The Orthodox Church in Fireworks, Georgia was half-collapsed, roof open to the rift, UV-tent fabric flapping like torn skin. A single icon of Mary holding the infant Jesus leaned against the altar — cracked, smoke-stained, but still there. That was where they laid him.
Kiddo — Cannibalus the Starveling — did not fight when Marion and Jim carried him to the spot. He was trembling, small, eight years old in body but ancient in terror. His crown had fallen off somewhere in the struggle. His dirty blond hair stuck to his forehead with sweat. He looked up at Purl with eyes that were suddenly very young and very afraid.
Purl stood over him in his tattered cassock-over-duster, staff planted in the cracked floorboards like a fence post. He looked exhausted, older than the stars, the lines in his face carved deeper by the rift-light. Susannah knelt beside him, whispering the order of the Orthodox rite as fast as she could remember it — fragments her grandmother had taught her, pieces she’d looked up on a cracked phone screen three nights ago when she first realized what she had to do.
“Purl, please,” she said, voice cracking. “He believes you can do this. That’s all that matters. He believes.”
Purl looked down at the boy-thing on the floor. Kiddo was curled on his side now, knees to chest, shaking. Not fighting. Just waiting.
Purl cleared his throat. His voice came out rough, like gravel dragged over iron.
“In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit…”
He spoke what he remembered — the exorcism of St. Basil, bits of the Great Book of Needs, whatever his mother used to mutter when she thought demons were in the trailer. He spoke it like a man reading last rites to himself.
Kiddo whimpered. A small, animal sound.
Marion and Jim pinned his arms and legs — not cruelly, just firmly. Marion’s hands were shaking. Jim’s face was stone, but his eyes were wet. Susannah held the icon of Mary above Kiddo’s head, trembling so badly the wood rattled.
Purl continued, voice low and steady:
“O Lord our God, Who has authority over every hostile power… deliver this Thy creature from every influence of unclean spirits… command the evil and impure spirits to depart…”
Kiddo’s breathing hitched. His small chest rose and fell faster.
“…and let no place be left in him for the adversary…”
The boy began to cry — real, choking sobs. Snot ran from his nose. Tears cut tracks through the grime on his cheeks.
Purl’s voice cracked on the next line.
“…and grant him peace, O Lord, and fill him with Thy light…”
Silence.
The rift overhead flickered — dimmed for a second, like a lightbulb about to burn out.
Kiddo lifted his head. His eyes were red, swollen, human. He looked at Purl — really looked — and whispered:
“…dad?”
Purl said nothing. He just lowered the staff until the tip touched the boy’s forehead. A single, faint purple spark jumped between them. Kiddo flinched, then relaxed. The crown on the floor beside him cracked once, then crumbled into black dust.
Susannah dropped to her knees beside him, gathered him into her arms. He buried his face in her shoulder and cried like any eight-year-old who has just realized he is not the center of the universe.
Purl turned away. His shoulders sagged. The staff slipped from his fingers and clattered to the floorboards.
He looked at Kiddo — still sobbing, still small, still believing Purl had the power to damn him.
For the first time since the rift opened, something cold and final settled in Purl’s remaining eye.
He had carried the wrong note for thirty-five years.
He had walked through every circle of hell the American underbelly had to offer.
He had fought angels in Waffle House parking lots and laughed when the chamber clicked empty against his own temple.
And now the wrong note — the one that had forced him to exist — was small enough to kill.
Purl reached down, grabbed Kiddo by the collar of his filthy Underoos with his one remaining good hand, and dragged the boy toward the rift.
Kiddo shrieked — pure animal terror.
“NO! NO! NOT THERE! NOT THE DEAD LANDS!”
Purl did not slow.
He stepped into the rift.
Reality tore like wet paper around them.
For an instant the church was filled with blinding purple-white light.
Marion lunged forward — too late.
Jim staggered, shotgun falling from numb fingers.
Susannah screamed.
But the rift did not close cleanly.
The Planck interference — the same anomalous mode that had let Purl and Kiddo exist in the first place — was already too strong.
Marion, standing closest to Purl, was caught in the drag.
Marion felt the floor drop out from under him.
The church vanished.
Purl and Kiddo and Marion landed hard on black sand.
The Dead Lands.
Not a physical place in the normal sense — a hellscape that only manifests as physical to those dragged across the threshold. A different universe’s skin, worn thin by the rift. Only Purl and Kiddo could freely walk here, but Purl had willed the crossing, and the interference had pulled Marion with them.
They landed in a loose triangle on the black sand.
Purl hit first — already wounded from Kiddo’s initial lash-out in the church. The boy’s Planck claws had torn deep gashes across his chest and arms as Purl dragged him through the rift. Blood soaked his cassock. His left arm hung in ribbons. His right eye was a weeping socket. But he was still standing. Still vibrating with that wrong note.
Kiddo landed beside him, crown gone, Underoos torn, blond hair matted with blood and ash. He scrambled backward on hands and knees, staring at Purl with wide, terrified eyes.
Marion landed face-down, ash in his mouth, coughing, disoriented.
Purl gripped the cleft in the earth with both hands and leveraged himself to his feet.
The motion was slow, arthritic, grotesque. Charred meat sloughed off his arms in wet sheets. One eye was gone; the socket wept black tar. The other eye — still blue, still furious — fixed on the boy.
“I’m Purl Ashblaque,” he rasped. “I’m the last grungeslinging…”
And that was when the battle began.
Kiddo screamed — not in mockery now, but in raw, animal panic — and thrust both hands forward.
The air between them ripped.
Planck-scale strings snapped into existence like razor-wire, twisting into claws of negative energy — black, light-devouring talons that reached for Purl’s chest. The sand beneath them vitrified instantly, turning to glass in jagged spikes.
Purl raised the staff — not to block, but to pluck.
He focused on a single wrong note — the one that had kept him alive since 1987 — and twisted it.
A low, metallic thrum rolled out from the staff’s tip.
The air in front of him folded — literally folded — like paper being creased.
The negative claws hit the fold and bounced back on Kiddo himself.
Kiddo yelped as his own energy ripped across his left shoulder. Black blood sprayed. He staggered, then lunged again, this time summoning a swarm of microscopic voids — tiny holes in reality that sucked light and sound inward.
Purl countered by plucking another string — this one higher, sharper.
A pulse of positive vacuum energy erupted from the staff, a shockwave of “too much existence.”
The voids collapsed in on themselves with tiny, wet pops, each one releasing a burst of heat that scorched the sand to glass.
Kiddo howled and charged — small body blurring with speed that should not have been possible.
He slammed into Purl like a missile.
The impact cracked ribs.
Purl staggered back, coughing blood, but grabbed Kiddo by the throat with his good hand and lifted him off the ground.
Kiddo’s legs kicked.
His tiny hands clawed at Purl’s wrist — Planck claws again, this time slicing through flesh and tendon.
Purl’s hand opened involuntarily.
Kiddo dropped, rolled, and came up firing a lance of pure negative energy straight at Purl’s heart.
Purl twisted the staff — a desperate pluck — and the lance bent in mid-air, curving around him and slamming into the sand behind.
The impact created a crater twenty feet wide, glass walls glowing cherry-red.
Purl staggered forward, blood dripping from his ruined hand, chest heaving.
He raised the staff one last time.
Kiddo laughed — high, broken, terrified.
“You can’t kill me, dad! I’m hunger! I’m forever!”
Purl smiled — small, cracked, tired.
“I’m not trying to kill you,” he rasped.
“I’m trying to finish what started the day you were born wrong.”
He plucked the final string — the original wrong note itself.
Reality screamed.
The black sand around them lifted into a whirlwind of glass shards.
The sky overhead tore open again — not a rift, but a wound in the Dead Lands itself.
The Planck foam boiled.
Objects near them began to forget how to exist — a nearby mutant cactus simply ceased, leaving a perfect cylindrical hole in the air.
Kiddo screamed — real, childlike terror — and threw everything he had left.
A massive claw of negative energy — the size of a house — erupted from his small body and slammed toward Purl.
Purl met it with the staff.
The collision was not an explosion.
It was a cancellation.
Positive and negative amplitudes met at the Planck scale and nullified each other.
For a radius of fifty feet, existence simply… stopped.
No light.
No sound.
No time.
When the null zone collapsed back into being, Purl was on his knees in the center of a perfect glass crater, staff broken in two across his lap.
Kiddo lay on his back ten feet away, chest heaving, throat already swelling from the backlash.
Purl looked at him.
Then he drew his broken gun — the Colt Python, barrel split, cylinder cracked, half the frame melted — and fired.
The explosion was not clean.
The round detonated inside the chamber. Shrapnel tore through Purl’s hand, through his wrist, through the meat of his forearm. Black blood sprayed in an arc. The bullet — or what was left of it — exited the gun in a spray of molten brass and burning powder and punched straight through Cannibalus’s throat.
The boy staggered back, eyes wide, hands flying to the hole. No scream — just a wet gurgle. His neck began to bloat grotesquely, like a balloon being over-inflated from the inside. Skin stretched, veins blackened, then split. A fountain of black blood hemorrhaged forth — thick, tarry, alive — spraying across Purl, across Marion. Slippery black blood that hissed when it touched the ground.
Marion wrenched himself free from the sand and saw…
Purl stagger forward two steps, then drop to one knee. The gun fell from what remained of his hand. The staff clattered beside him, runes flickering once, then dying.
Cannibalus wheezed and gagged as his throat swelled further. He clutched at the base of his larynx more and more frantically, until finally the bloating reached critical pressure. A second geyser of black blood erupted — not just from the wound, but from his mouth, his nostrils, his ears. The boy collapsed forward onto his hands and knees, blond hair plastered to his skull with gore.
Purl lay on the pristine sand, far away from the charred crater where he’d fallen originally.
Marion scrambled over the blood-drenched sand to him. He gathered his broken and bloodied body into his arms and tried to hold him up so that he could breathe. He didn’t say anything as he held him. They stayed that way for a long time — two ruined men in a ruined place, surrounded by the sound of a god choking on its own blood.
Finally Purl opened his eyes — one eye, the other a ruined socket.
“Is this all?” Purl whispered. “I was so afraid. I’d always pictured it as being so much worse, and with so much more suffering. Death, you know.” He closed his eye and smiled — a small, cracked smile. “This is more like something from a book… I can do this. I mean, I can die like this. What a relief… Thank you.”
Marion had half expected Purl to disappear like Obi-Wan Kenobi, but Purl didn’t disappear… he just died, like everyone else. A frozen moment passed and then Marion realized that he was, once again, on his knees and at the end of himself. He found the idea profoundly absurd, especially when he began to weep, once again.
Behind him, Cannibalus’s body finally burst — not dramatically, just a wet pop like an over-ripe fruit. Black blood pooled outward in a slow, spreading stain.
Silence.
And in that silence, the rift overhead — now visible again as a fading scar in the sky — flickered once, twice… and finally closed.
Marion kept holding Purl.
He kept weeping.
He kept breathing.
Hours passed — or maybe minutes, or years. Time in the Dead Lands didn’t behave. The sky stayed the color of old bruises. The black sand stayed cold. The silence stayed absolute.
Eventually Marion’s arms began to cramp. He lowered Purl gently to the sand — as gently as a man with shaking hands and a shattered heart could manage — and sat back on his heels. Purl’s face was peaceful in death, the cracked smile still there, like he’d finally heard the punchline to a joke he’d been waiting on since 1987.
Marion wiped his face with a bloody sleeve. Looked around.
Kiddo was still there.
The boy hadn’t burst completely.
He’d collapsed forward onto hands and knees, black blood pooled around him in a wide, sluggish stain, but his chest was still rising and falling — shallow, ragged, alive. The throat wound had clotted into a grotesque black scab. His blond hair was plastered to his skull with gore. He looked like any kid who’d fallen off a bike too hard — except this kid had once been hunger incarnate.
Marion stared at him for a long time.
He thought about standing up and walking away.
He thought about finding a sharp piece of glass from the vitrified sand and finishing what Purl started.
He thought about nothing at all.
Then he thought about the Jesus Prayer — the same one he’d muttered a thousand times in church basements and parking lots and bathroom stalls when the withdrawals were trying to kill him.
He crawled over.
Kiddo didn’t move when Marion pulled him from the blood pool. The boy was limp, fever-hot, breathing in shallow hitches. Marion gathered him into his lap — small, impossibly small — and sat cross-legged on the black sand.
He started to pray.
“Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner.”
Cross himself with his right hand.
Again.
“Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner.”
Cross.
Again.
“Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner.”
Cross.
Again.
He didn’t know how long he sat there.
Hours.
Days.
The words blurred into rhythm.
The rhythm blurred into breathing.
The breathing blurred into nothing.
Kiddo stirred once — a small, involuntary whimper — then went still again.
Marion kept going.
“Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner.”
Cross.
Again.
The sand didn’t change.
The sky didn’t change.
But something inside Marion did.
The prayer wasn’t a plea anymore.
It was a metronome.
A heartbeat.
A refusal to stop.
And then — sudden, impossible — the air in front of him folded.
Not dramatically.
No trumpets.
No choir.
Just a quiet crease in reality, like someone had gently bent a piece of black paper and let light leak through the seam.
Through the crease Marion saw the church in Fireworks — broken rafters, UV-tent glow, Susannah still on her knees by the altar, Jim standing frozen with the shotgun, both of them looking straight at the spot where the rift had been.
The crease widened — not with violence, but with patience.
Like an elevator door sliding open.
Marion felt it — the same sensation he’d felt once before, years ago, walking all night through Tyler after Rachel left: the sudden, undeserved UP.
The invisible hand under his ribs, lifting.
He gathered Kiddo closer — the boy still limp, still breathing — and stood.
He walked forward.
The sand didn’t crunch.
The air didn’t resist.
He stepped through.
The Dead Lands snapped shut behind him like a door closing on a bad dream.
He was back in the church.
Susannah looked up first. Her face was streaked with tears and ash. She saw Marion — blood-soaked, holding the unconscious body of the thing that had almost eaten the world — and her mouth opened, but no sound came out.
Jim turned slowly. The shotgun hung loose in his hand. He looked at Marion, then at Kiddo, then back at Marion.
“Jesus,” Jim whispered.
Marion didn’t answer.
He just walked to the nearest pew and sat down, Kiddo still in his lap.
The boy stirred — once — then went still again.
Marion kept his arms around him.
He didn’t pray anymore.
He didn’t need to.
The words were still there, looping quietly in his head like a song he’d never forget.
Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner.
And on this little bastard too.
The rift was gone.
The Dead Lands were gone.
Purl was gone.
But Marion was still here.
Kiddo was still here.
And somehow — against every law of hunger and physics — they were both still breathing.
Susannah crawled over. She put one hand on Kiddo’s forehead, the other on Marion’s shoulder.
Jim just stood there, shotgun dangling, looking at the three of them like he was seeing the punchline to a joke he’d waited twenty years to hear.
No one spoke.
There was nothing left to say.
Somewhere, very far away, a single wrong note had finally stopped vibrating.
And the universe — tired, absurd, wounded — kept going anyway.
