The Megahorde was still crowded around the perfect circle of light beneath him, swarming and shoving each other like a slow-motion riot. The unaware corpses in back were desperate to make it to the front, and the terrified Links in front were hurriedly stumbling to the back. Their wounded and filthy limbs tangled and scratched and shoved, and those of them that noticed the shape of their prey above them, rising into the sky like a phoenix, grasped and clutched stupidly at the open air.
A bright orange flicker caught Emmit's eye. He spun himself, still rising ever higher, and found himself staring down at the ruin of Roy's meat locker. It was fully engulfed in flame, bathing the creatures circling it in warm firelight that made them look like ants scurrying slowly around a destroyed anthill.
Good, Emmit thought. Tim and Pup won't be turned. His train of thought was cut short by another bout of thrusts and blows into his chest and stomach, and the red-hot spike buried itself deeper in his chest.
If I'm going to Heaven, then why does it hurt like hell?
He still had presence of mind to look down and find Roy's cabin, using the funeral pyre of the shed as a guide. It was getting hard to see now; he was very high, so high that if there had been birds in the time warp, they might have had to bank and swerve around him.
The cabin wasn't hard to find. All he had to do was wipe the tears from his eyes and trace the line of ants, meandering away from the inferno he had made and throwing themselves into the writhing mass of bodies that besieged the little log house.
Emmit was reminded of a time when he was a boy, riding his junky ten-speed down the sidewalk and chomping on a flavorless piece of gum. He had seen something moving on the sidewalk in front of him, something that looked like a shadow that was cast by nothing and yet changing shape constantly. He had parked his bike and squatted to see what he had discovered, and it had been a gigantic swarm of black ants. The biggest he had ever seen.
They were risking the dangers of the hot sidewalk to carry off pieces of a dead grasshopper, frantically hauling bits of the crushed insect back into the safety of the grass that housed their anthill. Emmit had been fascinated, staying much longer than he had intended to, watching the little creatures go about their work. Before leaving (and making sure not to run any of them over when he did) he had deposited his wad of chewing gum right beside the stream of shiny exoskeletons and skittering legs. He hadn't known if ants ate gum or not, but he figured if they did, they'd eat well.
He was reliving the moment now, watching the undead monsters far beneath him as they assaulted the cabin. He saw a red-orange glow shining out from the front of the cabin, almost as if Roy had had a porch light to turn on. The beams of firelight illuminated the maggot-like Megahorde, and Emmit knew with weary satisfaction that the front door was standing wide open. The Links looked like BBs being fed into an air rifle through a funnel; so many tiny little ant bodies all struggling to fit through one tight opening. Emmit even thought he could hear faint, guttural screams emanating from below him, screams that could only come from a man who was roughly the size and strength of an adult grizzly bear, but it could have been his overactive imagination. He was delirious with pain that was unlike anything he had ever felt before.
The air was beginning to rush past him, roaring in his ears and flapping his layered clothing. He tried to raise his arms from where they were pinned to his sides, but the upward momentum was too strong, and it hurt too much to try to fight it. He could barely even hold his head upright with the force of the wind beating down on him. His chin was glued to his shrieking chest. Below him, the tunnel of light ended in a tiny black dot like the pupil of a wide and unblinking blue eye.
He let his body relax; let the force of God or Odin or Zeus or whatever the hell had ahold of him take full control. He found that if he relaxed, it made the pumping assault on his sternum easier to take. The force of those invisible hands kept him turning in a slow circle as time and space tore itself apart once more, warping around his limp body.
Scenes began to appear around him, materializing out of the light beams and mist like trees in a foggy meadow. Each new blast of breathtaking pressure and agony seemed to bring another one out of the nothingness, and Emmit found that could hover and watch them all like short films projected onto shapeless movie screens of vapor.
To his left, he watched himself slinking nervously into the Dealer's Saloon pawn shop, emptying the last of his cash out of his deflated wallet and handing it to the creep behind the counter. He could smell the joint smoldering in the man's mouth, the burnt grass and armpit smell of cheap skunk weed. He watched the man hand him a scuffed .9mm handgun and a handful of rounds, no background checks or waiting periods necessary because he had a “nice face”. It had taken less than five minutes to buy the gun he
