As Mookie charges forward, boots pounding on hard stone, splashing in murky puddles of water dripping down from the streets and sewer tunnels above his head – the Blazes crackle and hiss, the candles behind his eyes gone suddenly dark. It takes the wind right out of him. His legs buckle. He skids on limestone scree–

Mookie falls forward, catching himself on stinging palms.

Heavy breath. Labored. Wheezing. Too old for this. Too old by a country mile.

“You OK?” comes a voice from ahead of him. He’s so disoriented that, for a moment, he doesn’t know who it is. But then she says in that bourbon-and-smoke voice, “How’s that classy chassis holding up, sailor?”

He hacks and coughs, suppresses a dry heave, and spits.

“Just fine. Drug picked a funny time to hit the bricks is all.” He doesn’t bother saying anything about that whole I’m old and tired business.

Skelly comes up, pats him on the shoulder. “Bluelight Special went dark, daddy-o?”

“Cut the slang shit.” He stands – not easily, his legs still feeling like a couple Slinkies staple-gunned to his ass. She looks wounded. He mutters: “Sorry.”

“You have blood on you.”

He looks. He does. Hands. Shirt. It takes him a second–

“Lulu’s dead,” Skelly says. Is that fear in her voice? Anger? Both?

“I’m sorry.”

He replays Lulu’s final moments – open neck, blood up like from a water fountain, mouth agape, gone. And when she falls, he sees Karyn standing in her place.

Karyn. Shit.

Death is a fact of his life. He loses guys down here all the time. This isn’t a forgiving place – it seems like the Grim Reaper has a house around every corner, in every pit, up every hollow shaft. Walls like these, lined with hundreds of human skulls, do little to shake the feeling. Whose skulls are these? He doesn’t even know.

But it isn’t about the dead. It’s about those who get left behind. Survivors are like amputees: a part cut off them, a phantom feeling and false limb put in place as a piss-poor replacement. Hobbling around. Never quite whole again. He doesn’t know how death is for the really truly dead, but for those left standing in its wake, it’s the worst thing in the world. Like Karyn. Karyn, who thought maybe she was in love. Karyn, who had a partner in this life.

Karyn, who doesn’t yet know that Lulu got a bullet to the neck.

A bullet maybe aimed for him.

Her blood is on him. In more ways than one.

The skulls around him no longer glow with swimmy, watery light – their open mouths and empty eyes have gone dark. The only light is from Skelly, who holds a torch – really, an old chair leg swaddled in gas-soaked rags and lit. The torch-flame pops and spits.