13 Bullets

Darkness claimed her, darkness far more profound and complete than the darkness she'd experienced inside the casket. There was no ground below her, nothing on either side of her, nothing above her. She lay motionless, unaware, inert. Then something changed.

Where before there had been no light, there was suddenly a light. A dim orange spark glowing all alone, stranded in the dark with her. It pulsed and flared yellow for a moment as if she'd breathed on an ember but then it sank back into dull orange. She reached for it, tried to keep it alive because she knew if she didn't, if she didn't do anything, it would blink out of existence and she would be all alone again. The spark grew as she poured her will into it. It grew and smoldered and she smelled smoke and she was glad. It became an ember, and then a pool of burning radiance, and suddenly it gave off enough light for her to see where she was. She was standing in the mill, right where she'd been when she fell asleep. The spark she'd thought she was nurturing was thirty yards away in the bottom of the half-collapsed crucible. It was more than just a little ember, she saw, it had just looked like that because it was so far away. It was a pool of molten incandescent metal and it swelled as she watched. It swelled and deepened and soon it spilled out over the crucible's thick lip.

The liquid metal ran down channels carved in the floor. It filled up molds and etched lines of fire through the cracks in the cement. It gathered in great glowing heaps of slag, cooling and turning black only to be melted again by new waves of super-heated metal as more and more spilled out from the crucible. Red light glared on every metal surface in the mill. Black smoke filled her lungs and she coughed wildly. The surging metal threatened to engulf her and she had to climb up on top of a huge mold before her feet her burned off. Clouds of red sparks filled the air around the crucible, torrents of dark smoke obscured the ceiling just as the metal covered the floor, a lake of fire. The heat was intense-it made her eyebrows curl up and it singed her nasal passages. She could barely breathe.

"No," she managed to shout before the fumes filled her throat and choked her and she coughed and coughed until she couldn't speak anymore. "This isn't real. This is just a dream!" Though it was like no dream she'd ever had before. She revised her statement: "It's all in my head!"

It was true, she knew it was true. But it didn't matter. If she fell into the molten iron she would still burn. Her skin would crisp and pull away from her muscles, her hair would catch flame. The pain would still be excruciating. Pain was all in the mind, too, and it would still hurt.

The liquid metal kept rising. Caxton grabbed at a chain hanging from the ceiling. The metal links were hot enough to scorch her palms but she knew she would climb up the chain if she had to.

The air roared around her, a hydrocarbon wind of burning iron. Her lungs grew dry and shredded inside her chest as she sucked in the air, trying to get one clean breath. Then her legs wobbled underneath her. Caxton tottered on the mold as it started to melt under her feet. The smoke in her throat made it hard to keep her balance as she kept coughing, a reedy, dry cough that hurt her lungs. She grabbed at the chain again and the metal burned her hand so badly she pulled it away, pure reflex. Her arm swung out and pulled her off balance as her feet shuffled on the mold, trying to find purchase as the metal edged up to touch her boots--and she opened her eyes.

She was awake.

She was lying face down on the floor of the mill, her cheek pressed against the cold cement. The crucible stood empty and cold at the far end of the open space. Behind her the half-deads were gathered around their fire, giggling away. How she had gotten so far away from them while she slept was a mystery. Had she crawled away in her sleep? She heard a sound like running water and looked up. Reyes stood a dozen feet away. The drawstring pants were down below his buttocks and he was relieving himself on a pile of old, rusted metal, pissing out not urine but blood. When he was done he pulled up his pants and strode over to where she lay.

She didn't have the strength to get up. She didn't have the strength to lift her face from the icy floor. She couldn't see any of him but his pale white feet. The toenails were thick and ragged. They looked like they could cut through flesh like steak knives.

"You don't scare me," she managed to croak. She expected her throat to be scorched-she could still taste smoke in the back of her mouth. But of course that had all been a dream. "You were human, once. You were a sad little man who stayed home and jacked off to the bra advertisements in magazines-"

One of his feet moved backward, lifting off the floor. It swung away from her, and then it came back. He kicked her right in the stomach and she wasn't ready for it. She felt like her guts liquefied inside of her body and came swimming up her throat, pressing down against her rectum. The pain was going to make her shit herself. She clenched down hard and somehow kept everything together.

"You had nothing, you were nobody," she cried. "Now you're even less. You're unnatural. The light of the sun melts you, you-"

He drew his foot back for another blow. She called out and he stopped, his feet spread on the cement, ready to kick her if she didn't say what he wanted to hear. She would gladly have said anything, anything at all, but she had no idea what the right words would be. "What time is it?" she asked, just trying to stall. The foot went back and hit her once more. It was like being struck by a moving car. She felt bones give way in her chest. The pain surged upward, to her brain, and without warning she-

-opened her eyes and saw black smoke drifting along the ceiling. She looked down and saw the red glow of the burning metal once more. She was back in the dream.

In the few moments while she'd been awake her dream-self had been busy. Ignoring the searing pain in her hands, Caxton had clambered up a thick chain and hung suspended perhaps ten feet above the surface of the molten metal. With her legs wrapped around the chain and her arms holding her in place she was, for the moment, safe, but she didn't see a lot of options as to what to do next. Nothing of the floor remained visible-the liquid iron had flooded the mill until the molds and tools and all but the uppermost lip of the crucible were submerged in burning, smoking metal. The mold she had stood on before had melted and was no more than a black stain on the reddish-orange surface of the bubbling sea below. The lake of fire was still rising, too-she could see it climbing up the windows, a thick meniscus of darkly glimmering slag spreading across the brick walls as still more molten iron poured from the crucible.

There was no way to go but up, and little enough above her worth climbing toward. She tried to wake up. She tried pinching herself, grabbing a thick fold of skin at her waist and twisting it, hard. The pain screamed through her belly but nothing happened. She pulled off one of her gloves and dropped it into the heaving liquid below. It struck the surface with a hiss and a gout of flame, then disappeared forever. She got her teeth into the sensitive webbing between her thumb and forefinger and bit down, hard. Harder. Hard enough to draw blood. The pain didn't wake her up. In desperation she closed her eyes and tried to imagine it all away, tried to find her way back to the waking world through sheer willpower. Again, she failed.

She thought of the cold mill, the long defunct mill of reality where the half-deads waited to taunt her, where Reyes kept beating the shit out of her. Did she really want to go back there, she wondered? Was it so much better than the burning mill of her dream?

Desperate, alone, barely able to see or breath for the smoke, she clutched to the hot chain and sobbed. She couldn't handle it anymore. The dream world was a hell of fire. Reality was pain and torture. There was a third option, she knew. She could just let go.

She tried to shove the thought away, to ignore it, but it kept coming back. It haunted her. She could just let go. Let go, and fall, and fall forever.