Bill came screaming at me. I’d dropped the gun.

“You don’t treat a gun like that.” He grabbed my arm like he was trying to break it loose. “You know better!”

The people near us turned around to glare at me.

I had the scar where my skin singed off for three years, and it took me just as long to return to the weapon and point it the right way.

I’m afraid this whole house will blow up, that the wood will crash under the pressure of the flame.

He is dead. I did it.

I pull out of the driveway and take off down the mountain, singing sweet freedom down the black lanes until my hands pull the steering wheel and twist, crashing the truck into a tree.

Jake

A chaos of trees. Trees on fire, ghosts flattening under trees, cars rolling down hills and crashing into them. My soul body soars through the forest over all of this chaos, tumbling through scenes of destruction.

We tumble until we crash into a thick mound of dirt, glittering with ecto-mist. It stops us, and then I sink through it, my calves and hands disappearing under the forest floor. All around me, stems, roots, and woody vines curl up from the soil, sprouting flowers of red, white, and pink.

They die as quickly as they grow. My astral body is up to its armpits in dirt and branches. My physical body is up the hill, in the seat of the crashed truck, its limp head resting on the wheel, the airbag deflating under its chin.

Impact must’ve knocked Sawyer out too . . .

There he is. His soul took a different course, and now he’s stumbling up the hill, the dark quicksand of dead world pulling at his shoes. Flares of smoke shape his flailing arms. Shadows of faces reach out from his forehead. Figments of arms reach out of his skin.

How many people . . . I think as I race to my feet. How many people have you hurt?

He thrashes like lightning up the hill, toward the truck. I push through the foliage, and it disappears around me in fizzles of green and red.

I push off from my feet, fly across the forest, and crash into him, our souls colliding like two physical properties as we nick the dying bark and spin to the ground. Splinters of light. My hands, aglow in pink and blue, clutching his hoodie like he’ll sink through my fingers. We become swimmers in the ground of the forest, fighting to stay above the escaping earth. It’s crawling with beetles and springtails, centipedes and worms—corpses and husks, skittering and cracking and decaying.

Sawyer claws at my face and drags his nails down it so the maggots and insects can burrow there.