Threnody (028).

(This is a 500-word-a-day novel project.)

He looked over at Jesse. Cussing doesn’t bother you, does it? It’s in the genes. My father could have melted the paint off the wall.

It’s fine with me, Jesse said, shifting, stretching out her leg.

He forced in a deep breath, and pushed it out slowly. We were in a bar. There was a fire. Couldn’t tell you where it started from…it was just there all of a sudden, and people were on fire, falling down…all that black smoke, and it was Maddy who got us out of there. She kicked out that window and climbed out with me. And later on when we ended up here, she kicked my ass a hundred times to keep going or I might have just sat down and ended up like them. Those dead fuckers that gave up.

Jesse thought of the trucker and shuddered. Fuckin’ bish!

Mine was a bus crash, Jesse said. She told him what she could remember – and it wasn’t much at all – in starts and stops. She was leaving Las Vegas, for good this time. There was a city bus that cut in front of her, and there was a crash. And then the snow.

So we’re dead, she said, finally voicing the thought that had been haunting her.

Half dead, maybe, Ryan said with a shrug. Everybody who ended up here had something like your bus crash. Fires and accidents – Tom said him and his brother were on a boat and it went down. But wherever we are, it’s like half real and half not. There’s places that are going to seem so real that it’s the worst thing here. Places where time works and people don’t walk around dead. Those places are hard.

I don’t get it, Jesse said. How can that be bad?

Ryan sighed. You’ll see.

He took the gun out and considered it for a second, and then held it out for her to take.

No way, she said. I’ve had really bad experiences with guns.

He turned it to the side, showing her that the safety was on. All right, he agreed. But you got nothing to worry about here. Okay?

She nodded – but she was remembering something else, an image of him pointing that gun at her and firing. It was Maddy’s memory, Jesse realized. And Ryan had killed her.

Whose gun was it? she asked, her voice sounding very small.

Was a cop’s, he answered, and though Jesse waited he said no more on the topic.

*

They walked and said nothing for a long while, which might have been minutes or hours, and at times seemed like both. Eventually the first of the trees began to appear, huge things that came out of the low-level dim fog, their bark dark hickory-colored, the leaves an electric green that didn’t look natural. I’m not like a tree scientist, Ryan said, but I’ve been around a little, and I never saw trees like that before. Make sure they don’t bite you.