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Riley's running through the woods trying to escape the terrible biting insects that are chasing him. They are roughly the size of dogs. Hopping and ricocheting off the grey leaves, they tick and warble as the mass of them grows closer. He would not be so afraid if they had stingers, but instead they have mandibles the size of his hands. Riley won't simply be stung if he fails to outrun the swarm: he will be ripped apart. There must some place he might hide where the insects can't follow, but he has lost his bearings. Near his campsite there was a cave that he could have crawled into, but he was scavenging away from camp when the things found him. His knife cannot save him from their numbers, nor can the machine pistol that rests at his hip. If he's going to survive, a deer trail leading to a den is his only hope. Between the tusks of a deer and the many jaws of these bugs, he would rather face a deer.
Within thirty seconds he finds a trail, but he is running so fast that he does not see the boot prints along it. When a squat, dreary house rises from the underbrush ahead of him, he doesn't think much on how it came to be there. Instead he looks at the protection it offers. It has thick wooden walls, boarded windows, and a front door. It's the greatest, most beautiful shelter that Riley has seen in his life. Better than even the ancient, decaying sky-towers of New York. The front door opens without resistance when he slams into it, and he holds it shut in darkness as the thousand gnashing things throw themselves against the door. They subside after an hour and Riley passes out.
When Riley wakes up, he can't be sure what time it is. A peek through the window boards shows him the skeletal under-canopy of the forest. He can't make out the permanently grey sky through the thick of grey leaves. Riley didn't expect to, but it bothers him that he can't predict how long he can stay in the house. There are signs of recent use all around the dwelling, but more importantly, there are signs of a planned return.
Personal effects and a dozen bedrolls laid out on the second floor give him the first suspicion. The empty ammunition boxes and half-burned candles that he finds in every room fill him with dreadful certainty, but the canned foods in the kitchen confirm it: the occupants of the house are highway robbers, and they are coming back at some point. If they find Riley in the house, they will no doubt try to kill him. Riley's hand falls instinctively to the holstered machine pistol and -there's a dead man on the wall and Riley did it because the house was on fire and the man killed them at the ramparts so Riley chased him and- Riley's hand recoils from the gun as though burned. He decides that he cannot stay long at all. Two days maximum, but only with vigilance.
Riley spends the remainder of the first day raiding the house by candlelight with his knife at the ready. He takes waterskins, food cans, bits of metal, and whatever else he thinks might be valuable. Hidden under a battered, drawer-less nightstand, he finds a four pound satchel of white pills. Under the lip of the kitchen table, he finds cigarettes. In the sleeping area he finds a red gem sewn into the lining of a bedroll. When he takes the gem to a window to see it in natural light, he finds that the sun has set. He extinguishes the flame without a thought and sits down in a corner to sleep. He does not need anyone or anything to know that he is in the house.
The sounds of night that he did not hear before assert themselves in his dreams. Riley wakes several times to the sound of bandits creeping up the stairs to murder him, but he can't bring himself to touch the gun. His hand trembles every time he reaches for it. A muzzle flare in the doorway is going to split the darkness, to end him at any moment as he sits trembling in the corner and he can't use the most useful thing he owns. Shortly before dawn, he wakes to the sound of the floor collapsing because fire has eaten the wood beneath it. When he finally rises, he is very much alive and the house is intact. He resumes his looting, but his mind is not at ease. Down, he thinks more than once, collapsing down. Riley isn't sure what it means.
He gathers knives, bullets, burlap sacks, whetstones, shoes, buttons, thread, blankets, shirts, matches, empty tin cans, pills, spoons, glass lenses, pants, a steel bowl, and every manner of item from every corner and hidden compartment of the house. Only at midday does Riley put his foot through a hole in the wooden first floor and realize that he has not been looking for a cellar.
Ultimately the smell gives up its location; the rankness of mildew seeps up from one corner of the common room. Riley pries up the boards with his knife and finds a ladder that descends into shadows. He imagines dropping down into the dark gallery with a thousand food cans that he has dreamed of for so many months. With a lit candle and his knife drawn, he descends.
The walls look as though they were carved from the surrounding rock. Frigid water seeps from them, leaving pools and white lime stains on the floor. The cellar is almost a small cave, and a dozen steps would carry Riley from one freezing end to the other. Sodden cardboard packages rot in the puddles, and rocks chipped off the walls are littered everywhere. His candlelight outlines the shape of a deer carcass suspended from the rafters. Behind the deer is an old mess of pipes and machinery that he doesn't recognize in such terrible light. Some long object, almost white, is handcuffed to the base of the machine. As his eyes adjust to the shadows, Riley realizes that the object is a detached human forearm. Riley is about to go back up the ladder when the arm moves.
He pauses. It was a rat, or possibly a fungus spore rolling itself about, but no: the arm is moving. Despite the distance and the poor light, it's trembling so violently that he can be sure of it.
He approaches the arm, ready to stab at any lunging thing that might jump from the shadows. Instead the shadows recede, and Riley finds that the forearm is not severed at all. Where he saw it terminate in darkness it is just hidden from sight: the owner of the arm lies before him trembling under a black tarp.
The cloth comes away under his hand and the naked girl beneath it curls up like some plant touched by fire. She is tall, but thin, thin as a skeleton. Riley cannot easily tell her age, but he guesses she is not a child. Her eyes are wild with a fear that Riley has not seen before. In the absence of robbers, she may have believed him a wild animal come to eat her. As her teeth start chattering, Riley wonders if she thinks the same thing now. He can see no food or water left for her, and realizes that she must be delirious. In place of sustenance, there is an iron phallus near her on the floor. Riley did not see it while approaching her, but it tells him why the robbers have kept her.
A sharp rock is all it takes for Riley to break the links of the handcuff and he sits her up against the nearest wall. Despite her terror, she does not resist. Weak as she is, Riley isn't sure that she can. His half-full water canteen is all that he can offer her for now, but the food upstairs should be more than enough to keep her from dying. He uncaps the canteen and tilts a sip of water into her mouth.
There is a noise behind Riley. Loud, wooden, as of someone departing from the ladder that leads to the first floor. Riley is on his feet, turning about, and before he understands what has happened, his hand has gripped the machine pistol and raised it to the sound.
The man charging at Riley comes to a halt halfway between Riley and the dark radius of the candle's glow. Riley thinks at first that the man is thirty or forty, but in truth the hard-edged shadows of the candle have made him look older. Riley brings the candle to bear and finds that it's a young man. A boy, really. He looks to be Riley's age. The boy is wearing colors that would camouflage well in the forest outside, and he knew to be silent when descending the ladder until he was ready to strike. Riley is certain that this boy is a robber. The robber boy doesn't look so certain of anything in that moment.
The robber didn't see Riley's gun until it was leveled at his face, and against it, the club that he wields, a chair leg, is of no use. He would drop it if asked, but Riley doesn't ask. Riley doesn't do anything.
The robber boy shifts on his feet.
“You want something?” says the robber boy. “You ain't shot me yet.”
Riley does not hear him. Sounds of the attack on Resettlement are clashing in his brain. He's holding the gun again. He's pointing it at someone. Riley is clutching the grip because it's the only thing he can hold on to as his mind careens away from him.
Riley is back in his hometown before he left, and he can smell the smoke that's rising up the twisted stairwell. As he vaults up the final steps, he can hear the noises of gunfire and the screaming of men through an open window at the top. Close by, perhaps in the street just below the window, a baby's cries are silenced by a gunshot. The wailing of the wounded rises and falls, secondary only to the crackle of burning wood as Riley squints through the smoke in this, the upper story of some house in Resettlement.
The bandit steps out of a side room and into the hallway, arms filled with stolen clothes and jewelry. The bandit stops short when he sees Riley through the eye-burning haze of heat and smoke. Riley raises the gun slowly. So slowly. Despite the smoke, the bandit's eyes widen. The heat waves that play across the air make the machine pistol look like a serpent in the boy's grip. The clothing and diamonds tumble to the floor as he puts his hands up. Through their boots, both Riley and the bandit can feel the floor growing hot as fire licks the underside of the log floor. Riley smiles.
A cannon shot from elsewhere in the town startles the both of them. The bandit ducks back into the side room and Riley follows, using even his hands to tear down the hallway. Every millisecond that the bandit is gone from his sight means another moment the bandit isn't dead like Riley's father. Riley turns and he is in the same room as the bandit once more. The bandit has his back to Riley and the doorway. He stands before the window, which he now realizes is too small to escape from. Riley with his writhing death-snake of a gun is blocking the only exit. The bandit turns slowly, just as slowly as Riley raises the machine pistol a second time.
The bandit steps back until he is pressed against the wall. Riley grins and steps forward. The bandit tries to press himself into the wall, through the wall to escape the grinning effigy of death that is advancing on him. Riley steps forward again. The bandit looks at this boy with the gun, trying to say something without words about shared humanity, about decency, about all the good things that Riley doesn't believe in as Riley pulls on the trigger and holds it down.
Riley watches in a second of hyper-clarity as a rain of destruction crawls up the man's torso. The bandit's stomach disappears, followed by his solar plexus, then the sternum. Each body part is sprayed on the wall behind him. The man's throat is torn open on the left side, then the cheek is shredded. The now-toothless grin of his skull bares itself to Riley, who is terrified. A hole opens itself in the bandit's left eye. A hole above the same eye is laid open. The crown of the head disappears. The rest of the bullets bury themselves in the wall over the man's head. The gun falls silent and the corpse is still standing, pressed and splattered, against the far wall. Riley has forgotten the smoke, the heat, and the floor which is slowly roasting his feet.
The man's body draws a breath and Riley's world ends. With heart blood boiling on the floor, with a dozen pieces missing, the man is still alive. Riley can see the wall through the man's eye socket. The arms that hang by the body's side are unscathed by bullets, and they begin to move, to rise. The arms reach out for Riley, palms turned upward as though for want of embrace. The smile with which Riley shredded the bandit has not yet departed Riley's face, even though he is afraid. The body takes one half-step forward, and he notices the mindless smile of the bandit's skull. For Riley, it's like a mirror. Riley is in hell.
A man had stood against the wall. If Riley had spoken a few words to him, the man would have responded. He probably would have begged for his life. Or he might have tried to bargain his way out of death. Maybe he would have tried to overpower Riley and escape, if given enough time. Riley realizes that being overpowered wouldn't have been so bad. He may have lived through it, and the bandit may have, too.
The floor collapses under the body's feet and a surging uproar of flame takes it. Heat drives Riley back, drives him out of the house. After that, there is nothing to remember but running. Running and orange flames, running from the orange flames throughout the town.
In Riley's own candlelight in the basement, the robber boy can see that the gun is shaking in Riley's hands. He must imagine that the pistol is empty. The grin that spreads itself like a sudden disease on the robber's face is what refocuses Riley. It's another mirror of a feverish, gleeful murderer, and Riley's reflection speaks.
“You little fucker, playing mighty with that gun,” says the robber boy. “I bet when you put bullets in it, you can make people dead real fast and easy. I'm gonna kill you and have fun with that thing.” He hefts the club and charges once more at the intruder and the fully-loaded gun. The robber boy is not so malnourished as Riley, and he has a weapon. Riley has his machine pistol that he cannot use. He wants to throw the gun away, to find as deep a pit as he can an cast it in, but the robber's club catches him on the shoulder. The silver killing-thing falls from Riley's grasp, and he falls to his knees. Another blow from the robber boy makes the world ripple and darken, as though somehow a black, gauzy haze has been strung from every rafter. Riley can feel a liquid warmth upon his head, and a strange, comforting heat on the fingers of his hand. He does not fear another blow, for he does not remember being struck. The floor sways and the world makes a creaking noise from somewhere above as he looks to the heat where the candle is burning. So near to his wax-covered hand, so close to one of the watery pools that dot the floor, another inch and it would have gone out, throwing the final moments of Riley into an irrevocable darkness. The candle is the only thing that is not hazy, but it is fluttering and small. He grabs the candle, worried that the slowly tipping floor will roll the the wick into water.
The floor drops away as two iron grips on Riley's clothing haul him into a floating world of black clouds where a demon's face rises from the ground up into the starless stretch of space.
“YOU'RE STILL ALIVE?” it screams. “YOU'RE DEAD, YOU'RE SO FUCKING DEAD!”
It begins lifting Riley, pulling him higher and higher through gusting winds until the demon is holding him above its head so that it can cast him down as Riley wanted to cast down the gun. Even in airless space where he has difficulty breathing, Riley can feel that the candle is still burning.
In a moment of clarity, he raises it and tilts it into the demon's eye. The faint hiss of steaming liquid is so quiet that Riley almost does not hear it over the rushing of blood in his ears. He wonders for a moment if the demon should even blink at such an act, but for a moment even the winds fade away as the candle protrudes from the eye socket. It is held in place by now-solid wax.
The demon clutches for its face, and Riley plummets to the ground. He hears screaming, and then the floor sends everything away.
He awakens with a soft pressure on his head, wrapped all around as though he has been bandaged. He is in the basement still, and the throbbing of his head is painful despite the cold. The bandages themselves stir when Riley does, unrolling and pressing gently against his cheek. Riley cannot make sense of the wrappings until they weakly hug him around the shoulders and begin speaking.
“The thing he was,” says the girl, “I saw it.”
The voice is dry and hoarse, and she struggles for breath after living so long among molds. Her whole body is weak, weaker than Riley, but she shifts him to cradle his head in her lap. What little warmth she offers isn't enough to keep away the cold. Riley gropes for a matchbook in his pocket. She keeps talking, but she sounds so far away and Riley ignores her for a moment. It takes him three tries to ignite the match, but when he does, the flare of light is soft. A candle drops into his view, proffered by the girl's skeleton-like hand.
With light once more, Riley stands up. Slowly. The robber boy is lying near the wall, and on the wall itself is a jagged smear of blood.
“He did it,” says the girl. “Smashed his head. Tripped.”
Riley traces the ribbon of dark red down the wall, where it leads to the unmoving head of the robber boy. The robber boy is not reaching for him and the blood is not boiling this time, but Riley can't help but to feel as though-
“You didn't kill him,” she says.
He turns away from the body to squat before the cross-legged woman.
She has a beautiful and vacant face that is full enough to be attractive, but it sits atop a body that is ruined. A slow urge to recoil and gag almost overtakes Riley as he looks from her torso without breasts to the cracked skin of her belly. Her collarbone, protruding so far from the shrunken skin around it, sits atop her torso like some oversized noose. Riley looks into her eyes, where dual pinpricks of candle flame slowly dance.
“You didn't kill him,” says the girl. “He did that himself.”
Riley takes one last glance at the robber boy's body. Near the feet, there is a wet depression in the floor that could trip up an incautious person. Riley nods slowly, turning again to look at the girl. She cranes her neck to look around.
“I need water,” she says.
He finds his canteen uncapped on the floor. Most of it spilled out when the robber boy surprised him, but there is still enough for two or three small sips. He sets the candle down on the floor and tilts the water into her mouth again.
Before there was sheer terror, but now there is something in her eyes that Riley can't identify. Supplication, maybe, which sickens Riley more than seeing her starved and chained among phalluses and mold. So recently broken as he was, it shames him now to be the only help she has. It is a new feeling for Riley that causes nothing but distress: he isn't sure that he'll take her from this place until she reaches for him.
“I'm Andrea. I can... I can do things for you. Take me with you,” she says. She slides her hand up his inner thigh, but he pushes it away. “I can make you feel-”
“Stop,” says Riley. “Just stop. I'm taking you with me, and don't do that again. I've killed someone, and if I don't make someone live, I'll never be right.”
“Thank you,” she says.
“Come on.”
Riley helps her stand and carries her up the ladder on his back. Through the boarded windows, Riley can see that it is daylight and can hear the sound of shouting. When he peers out the window, he can see robbers with backpacks and guns emerging from the forest in single file. The robber boy must have been sent ahead to ready the house. He sets Andrea down, where she teeters.
“The gun,” she says. “The gun. You can't leave it here.”
From one pile of gathered objects Riley plucks a shirt and pants for Andrea and tells her to put them on if she can. Then he drops into the basement to find the machine pistol. He hasn't decided what he'll do with it yet, but Andrea is right. He won't leave it here for the robbers to use. When he emerges from the basement once more, he grabs his backpack, leads Andrea to the back of the house, and helps her through a window after he smashes it open. Lifting Andrea in his arms, he begins a slow march toward the trees as the first robber opens the front door.

Description
body div#devskin0 hr { }

Riley's running through the woods trying to escape the terrible biting insects that are chasing him. They are roughly the size of dogs. Hopping and ricocheting off the grey leaves, they tick and warble as the mass of them grows closer. He would not be so afraid if they had stingers, but instead they have mandibles the size of his hands. Riley won't simply be stung if he fails to outrun the swarm: he will be ripped apart. There must some place he might hide where the insects can't follow, but he has lost his bearings. Near his campsite there was a cave that he could have crawled into, but he was scavenging away from camp when the things found him. His knife cannot save him from their numbers, nor can the machine pistol that rests at his hip. If he's going to survive, a deer trail leading to a den is his only hope. Between the tusks of a deer and the many jaws of these bugs, he would rather face a deer.
Within thirty seconds he finds a trail, but he is running so fast that he does not see the boot prints along it. When a squat, dreary house rises from the underbrush ahead of him, he doesn't think much on how it came to be there. Instead he looks at the protection it offers. It has thick wooden walls, boarded windows, and a front door. It's the greatest, most beautiful shelter that Riley has seen in his life. Better than even the ancient, decaying sky-towers of New York. The front door opens without resistance when he slams into it, and he holds it shut in darkness as the thousand gnashing things throw themselves against the door. They subside after an hour and Riley passes out.
When Riley wakes up, he can't be sure what time it is. A peek through the window boards shows him the skeletal under-canopy of the forest. He can't make out the permanently grey sky through the thick of grey leaves. Riley didn't expect to, but it bothers him that he can't predict how long he can stay in the house. There are signs of recent use all around the dwelling, but more importantly, there are signs of a planned return.
Personal effects and a dozen bedrolls laid out on the second floor give him the first suspicion. The empty ammunition boxes and half-burned candles that he finds in every room fill him with dreadful certainty, but the canned foods in the kitchen confirm it: the occupants of the house are highway robbers, and they are coming back at some point. If they find Riley in the house, they will no doubt try to kill him. Riley's hand falls instinctively to the holstered machine pistol and -there's a dead man on the wall and Riley did it because the house was on fire and the man killed them at the ramparts so Riley chased him and- Riley's hand recoils from the gun as though burned. He decides that he cannot stay long at all. Two days maximum, but only with vigilance.
Riley spends the remainder of the first day raiding the house by candlelight with his knife at the ready. He takes waterskins, food cans, bits of metal, and whatever else he thinks might be valuable. Hidden under a battered, drawer-less nightstand, he finds a four pound satchel of white pills. Under the lip of the kitchen table, he finds cigarettes. In the sleeping area he finds a red gem sewn into the lining of a bedroll. When he takes the gem to a window to see it in natural light, he finds that the sun has set. He extinguishes the flame without a thought and sits down in a corner to sleep. He does not need anyone or anything to know that he is in the house.
The sounds of night that he did not hear before assert themselves in his dreams. Riley wakes several times to the sound of bandits creeping up the stairs to murder him, but he can't bring himself to touch the gun. His hand trembles every time he reaches for it. A muzzle flare in the doorway is going to split the darkness, to end him at any moment as he sits trembling in the corner and he can't use the most useful thing he owns. Shortly before dawn, he wakes to the sound of the floor collapsing because fire has eaten the wood beneath it. When he finally rises, he is very much alive and the house is intact. He resumes his looting, but his mind is not at ease. Down, he thinks more than once, collapsing down. Riley isn't sure what it means.
He gathers knives, bullets, burlap sacks, whetstones, shoes, buttons, thread, blankets, shirts, matches, empty tin cans, pills, spoons, glass lenses, pants, a steel bowl, and every manner of item from every corner and hidden compartment of the house. Only at midday does Riley put his foot through a hole in the wooden first floor and realize that he has not been looking for a cellar.
Ultimately the smell gives up its location; the rankness of mildew seeps up from one corner of the common room. Riley pries up the boards with his knife and finds a ladder that descends into shadows. He imagines dropping down into the dark gallery with a thousand food cans that he has dreamed of for so many months. With a lit candle and his knife drawn, he descends.
The walls look as though they were carved from the surrounding rock. Frigid water seeps from them, leaving pools and white lime stains on the floor. The cellar is almost a small cave, and a dozen steps would carry Riley from one freezing end to the other. Sodden cardboard packages rot in the puddles, and rocks chipped off the walls are littered everywhere. His candlelight outlines the shape of a deer carcass suspended from the rafters. Behind the deer is an old mess of pipes and machinery that he doesn't recognize in such terrible light. Some long object, almost white, is handcuffed to the base of the machine. As his eyes adjust to the shadows, Riley realizes that the object is a detached human forearm. Riley is about to go back up the ladder when the arm moves.
He pauses. It was a rat, or possibly a fungus spore rolling itself about, but no: the arm is moving. Despite the distance and the poor light, it's trembling so violently that he can be sure of it.
He approaches the arm, ready to stab at any lunging thing that might jump from the shadows. Instead the shadows recede, and Riley finds that the forearm is not severed at all. Where he saw it terminate in darkness it is just hidden from sight: the owner of the arm lies before him trembling under a black tarp.
The cloth comes away under his hand and the naked girl beneath it curls up like some plant touched by fire. She is tall, but thin, thin as a skeleton. Riley cannot easily tell her age, but he guesses she is not a child. Her eyes are wild with a fear that Riley has not seen before. In the absence of robbers, she may have believed him a wild animal come to eat her. As her teeth start chattering, Riley wonders if she thinks the same thing now. He can see no food or water left for her, and realizes that she must be delirious. In place of sustenance, there is an iron phallus near her on the floor. Riley did not see it while approaching her, but it tells him why the robbers have kept her.
A sharp rock is all it takes for Riley to break the links of the handcuff and he sits her up against the nearest wall. Despite her terror, she does not resist. Weak as she is, Riley isn't sure that she can. His half-full water canteen is all that he can offer her for now, but the food upstairs should be more than enough to keep her from dying. He uncaps the canteen and tilts a sip of water into her mouth.
There is a noise behind Riley. Loud, wooden, as of someone departing from the ladder that leads to the first floor. Riley is on his feet, turning about, and before he understands what has happened, his hand has gripped the machine pistol and raised it to the sound.
The man charging at Riley comes to a halt halfway between Riley and the dark radius of the candle's glow. Riley thinks at first that the man is thirty or forty, but in truth the hard-edged shadows of the candle have made him look older. Riley brings the candle to bear and finds that it's a young man. A boy, really. He looks to be Riley's age. The boy is wearing colors that would camouflage well in the forest outside, and he knew to be silent when descending the ladder until he was ready to strike. Riley is certain that this boy is a robber. The robber boy doesn't look so certain of anything in that moment.
The robber didn't see Riley's gun until it was leveled at his face, and against it, the club that he wields, a chair leg, is of no use. He would drop it if asked, but Riley doesn't ask. Riley doesn't do anything.
The robber boy shifts on his feet.
“You want something?” says the robber boy. “You ain't shot me yet.”
Riley does not hear him. Sounds of the attack on Resettlement are clashing in his brain. He's holding the gun again. He's pointing it at someone. Riley is clutching the grip because it's the only thing he can hold on to as his mind careens away from him.
Riley is back in his hometown before he left, and he can smell the smoke that's rising up the twisted stairwell. As he vaults up the final steps, he can hear the noises of gunfire and the screaming of men through an open window at the top. Close by, perhaps in the street just below the window, a baby's cries are silenced by a gunshot. The wailing of the wounded rises and falls, secondary only to the crackle of burning wood as Riley squints through the smoke in this, the upper story of some house in Resettlement.
The bandit steps out of a side room and into the hallway, arms filled with stolen clothes and jewelry. The bandit stops short when he sees Riley through the eye-burning haze of heat and smoke. Riley raises the gun slowly. So slowly. Despite the smoke, the bandit's eyes widen. The heat waves that play across the air make the machine pistol look like a serpent in the boy's grip. The clothing and diamonds tumble to the floor as he puts his hands up. Through their boots, both Riley and the bandit can feel the floor growing hot as fire licks the underside of the log floor. Riley smiles.
A cannon shot from elsewhere in the town startles the both of them. The bandit ducks back into the side room and Riley follows, using even his hands to tear down the hallway. Every millisecond that the bandit is gone from his sight means another moment the bandit isn't dead like Riley's father. Riley turns and he is in the same room as the bandit once more. The bandit has his back to Riley and the doorway. He stands before the window, which he now realizes is too small to escape from. Riley with his writhing death-snake of a gun is blocking the only exit. The bandit turns slowly, just as slowly as Riley raises the machine pistol a second time.
The bandit steps back until he is pressed against the wall. Riley grins and steps forward. The bandit tries to press himself into the wall, through the wall to escape the grinning effigy of death that is advancing on him. Riley steps forward again. The bandit looks at this boy with the gun, trying to say something without words about shared humanity, about decency, about all the good things that Riley doesn't believe in as Riley pulls on the trigger and holds it down.
Riley watches in a second of hyper-clarity as a rain of destruction crawls up the man's torso. The bandit's stomach disappears, followed by his solar plexus, then the sternum. Each body part is sprayed on the wall behind him. The man's throat is torn open on the left side, then the cheek is shredded. The now-toothless grin of his skull bares itself to Riley, who is terrified. A hole opens itself in the bandit's left eye. A hole above the same eye is laid open. The crown of the head disappears. The rest of the bullets bury themselves in the wall over the man's head. The gun falls silent and the corpse is still standing, pressed and splattered, against the far wall. Riley has forgotten the smoke, the heat, and the floor which is slowly roasting his feet.
The man's body draws a breath and Riley's world ends. With heart blood boiling on the floor, with a dozen pieces missing, the man is still alive. Riley can see the wall through the man's eye socket. The arms that hang by the body's side are unscathed by bullets, and they begin to move, to rise. The arms reach out for Riley, palms turned upward as though for want of embrace. The smile with which Riley shredded the bandit has not yet departed Riley's face, even though he is afraid. The body takes one half-step forward, and he notices the mindless smile of the bandit's skull. For Riley, it's like a mirror. Riley is in hell.
A man had stood against the wall. If Riley had spoken a few words to him, the man would have responded. He probably would have begged for his life. Or he might have tried to bargain his way out of death. Maybe he would have tried to overpower Riley and escape, if given enough time. Riley realizes that being overpowered wouldn't have been so bad. He may have lived through it, and the bandit may have, too.
The floor collapses under the body's feet and a surging uproar of flame takes it. Heat drives Riley back, drives him out of the house. After that, there is nothing to remember but running. Running and orange flames, running from the orange flames throughout the town.
In Riley's own candlelight in the basement, the robber boy can see that the gun is shaking in Riley's hands. He must imagine that the pistol is empty. The grin that spreads itself like a sudden disease on the robber's face is what refocuses Riley. It's another mirror of a feverish, gleeful murderer, and Riley's reflection speaks.
“You little fucker, playing mighty with that gun,” says the robber boy. “I bet when you put bullets in it, you can make people dead real fast and easy. I'm gonna kill you and have fun with that thing.” He hefts the club and charges once more at the intruder and the fully-loaded gun. The robber boy is not so malnourished as Riley, and he has a weapon. Riley has his machine pistol that he cannot use. He wants to throw the gun away, to find as deep a pit as he can an cast it in, but the robber's club catches him on the shoulder. The silver killing-thing falls from Riley's grasp, and he falls to his knees. Another blow from the robber boy makes the world ripple and darken, as though somehow a black, gauzy haze has been strung from every rafter. Riley can feel a liquid warmth upon his head, and a strange, comforting heat on the fingers of his hand. He does not fear another blow, for he does not remember being struck. The floor sways and the world makes a creaking noise from somewhere above as he looks to the heat where the candle is burning. So near to his wax-covered hand, so close to one of the watery pools that dot the floor, another inch and it would have gone out, throwing the final moments of Riley into an irrevocable darkness. The candle is the only thing that is not hazy, but it is fluttering and small. He grabs the candle, worried that the slowly tipping floor will roll the the wick into water.
The floor drops away as two iron grips on Riley's clothing haul him into a floating world of black clouds where a demon's face rises from the ground up into the starless stretch of space.
“YOU'RE STILL ALIVE?” it screams. “YOU'RE DEAD, YOU'RE SO FUCKING DEAD!”
It begins lifting Riley, pulling him higher and higher through gusting winds until the demon is holding him above its head so that it can cast him down as Riley wanted to cast down the gun. Even in airless space where he has difficulty breathing, Riley can feel that the candle is still burning.
In a moment of clarity, he raises it and tilts it into the demon's eye. The faint hiss of steaming liquid is so quiet that Riley almost does not hear it over the rushing of blood in his ears. He wonders for a moment if the demon should even blink at such an act, but for a moment even the winds fade away as the candle protrudes from the eye socket. It is held in place by now-solid wax.
The demon clutches for its face, and Riley plummets to the ground. He hears screaming, and then the floor sends everything away.
He awakens with a soft pressure on his head, wrapped all around as though he has been bandaged. He is in the basement still, and the throbbing of his head is painful despite the cold. The bandages themselves stir when Riley does, unrolling and pressing gently against his cheek. Riley cannot make sense of the wrappings until they weakly hug him around the shoulders and begin speaking.
“The thing he was,” says the girl, “I saw it.”
The voice is dry and hoarse, and she struggles for breath after living so long among molds. Her whole body is weak, weaker than Riley, but she shifts him to cradle his head in her lap. What little warmth she offers isn't enough to keep away the cold. Riley gropes for a matchbook in his pocket. She keeps talking, but she sounds so far away and Riley ignores her for a moment. It takes him three tries to ignite the match, but when he does, the flare of light is soft. A candle drops into his view, proffered by the girl's skeleton-like hand.
With light once more, Riley stands up. Slowly. The robber boy is lying near the wall, and on the wall itself is a jagged smear of blood.
“He did it,” says the girl. “Smashed his head. Tripped.”
Riley traces the ribbon of dark red down the wall, where it leads to the unmoving head of the robber boy. The robber boy is not reaching for him and the blood is not boiling this time, but Riley can't help but to feel as though-
“You didn't kill him,” she says.
He turns away from the body to squat before the cross-legged woman.
She has a beautiful and vacant face that is full enough to be attractive, but it sits atop a body that is ruined. A slow urge to recoil and gag almost overtakes Riley as he looks from her torso without breasts to the cracked skin of her belly. Her collarbone, protruding so far from the shrunken skin around it, sits atop her torso like some oversized noose. Riley looks into her eyes, where dual pinpricks of candle flame slowly dance.
“You didn't kill him,” says the girl. “He did that himself.”
Riley takes one last glance at the robber boy's body. Near the feet, there is a wet depression in the floor that could trip up an incautious person. Riley nods slowly, turning again to look at the girl. She cranes her neck to look around.
“I need water,” she says.
He finds his canteen uncapped on the floor. Most of it spilled out when the robber boy surprised him, but there is still enough for two or three small sips. He sets the candle down on the floor and tilts the water into her mouth again.
Before there was sheer terror, but now there is something in her eyes that Riley can't identify. Supplication, maybe, which sickens Riley more than seeing her starved and chained among phalluses and mold. So recently broken as he was, it shames him now to be the only help she has. It is a new feeling for Riley that causes nothing but distress: he isn't sure that he'll take her from this place until she reaches for him.
“I'm Andrea. I can... I can do things for you. Take me with you,” she says. She slides her hand up his inner thigh, but he pushes it away. “I can make you feel-”
“Stop,” says Riley. “Just stop. I'm taking you with me, and don't do that again. I've killed someone, and if I don't make someone live, I'll never be right.”
“Thank you,” she says.
“Come on.”
Riley helps her stand and carries her up the ladder on his back. Through the boarded windows, Riley can see that it is daylight and can hear the sound of shouting. When he peers out the window, he can see robbers with backpacks and guns emerging from the forest in single file. The robber boy must have been sent ahead to ready the house. He sets Andrea down, where she teeters.
“The gun,” she says. “The gun. You can't leave it here.”
From one pile of gathered objects Riley plucks a shirt and pants for Andrea and tells her to put them on if she can. Then he drops into the basement to find the machine pistol. He hasn't decided what he'll do with it yet, but Andrea is right. He won't leave it here for the robbers to use. When he emerges from the basement once more, he grabs his backpack, leads Andrea to the back of the house, and helps her through a window after he smashes it open. Lifting Andrea in his arms, he begins a slow march toward the trees as the first robber opens the front door.