“No,” Billy says, “I think, for now, we should stay right here.” He eyes the tree line beyond the fence, tries to figure out how far he could get if he loped into it at top speed.
“Billy,” Lucifer says. “I hate to put it this way, but you don’t have a choice.”
Billy opens his mouth to protest.
Lucifer raises his hand and snaps, once, only instead of a snapping sound his fingers make the pungent ashy burst-noise of an old-timey flashbulb, complete with the crinkle of tiny glass collapsing. And, just as if the Devil has popped a flashbulb in his face, everything goes white.
He waits for his vision to clear. Waits for the world to come back. But nothing. Everything stays white.
Oh shit, he thinks. I’ve gone blind.
Except he hasn’t gone blind. He looks down and he sees his hands, his torso, his legs. But there’s nothing beneath his feet. No Ohio mud. Nothing. Whiteness. He suddenly has to fight back the sense that he’s not standing, but falling, plummeting through empty space. He looks around, helplessly hoping to find a point he can use to orient himself, but there’s nothing.
He clenches his eyes shut and waits there in self-imposed darkness for a second, until the wave of rising nausea passes. A vast silence roars around him.
Eyes still closed, he drops into a crouch, reaches down, touches whatever it is that is supporting his feet, reaffirms the presence of resistance. So, okay, there’s that at least.
He slowly rises to standing again, opens his eyes, lets the whiteness rush in. He turns a full circle, hoping to find something behind him, but there’s just more nothing. He would have thought, when he woke up this morning, that nothingness was not really a thing that could be meaningfully modified with terms like more or less, but there behind him is definitely more nothingness, definitely, in fact, too much nothingness. It’s like he’s mainlining pure oppression directly into his eyeballs. It’s like all his senses are being smothered to death under a pillow.
And it is then that Billy thinks, with a sickening jolt: Oh, shit. I’m not blind. I’m dead.
No, he tells himself. No. I can’t be dead.
Why not? You could die. People do die. Why not you? This could be Hell. The Devil killed you and sent you to Hell.
Is this Hell? This combination: consciousness plus nothingness? It’s not what he imagined but he feels certain that remaining in this place, alone, will cause him to suffer, as surely as if he were writhing within a lake of fire.
He pats down his pockets, finds the loose change from the Americano, and throws it out into the void, hoping that just seeing something, anything, will help to quell the panic. The coins fall in the arc dictated by Newtonian physics, bounce, scatter out, help to define a plane that Billy can think of as the ground. It’s not much but it helps to orient him a little bit.
He sits and thinks. There has to be a way out of this.
After a few moments pass, his thoughts turn instead to Denver. He allows himself to regret the fact that he died with Denver thinking that he was a flake. A cheating flake. An asshole. A cheating flake asshole. He wishes he could have proven to her that he could be a person who was, what was it, fully present. He won’t be getting any more present now, that’s for sure.
He takes a moment to try to envision what his funeral will be like, tries to work up a gratifying image of his friends, griefstricken at his graveside, rending their garments and such. But all he can envision is them at the table at Barometer last night, all together, laughing, having a good time, without him.
Fuck.
He wonders how long it will be before he goes insane. He gives himself maybe an hour.
No, he thinks, closing his eyes again to block out the nothingness. It doesn’t make sense. The Devil double-crossed you for some reason. And that reason wasn’t to kill you. He talked about a plan. He talked about a Phase Two.
A Phase Two is at least something, not nothing, and as such Billy clutches at it with hope.
A Phase Two might not, of course, be anything good.
He recounts the one thing he knows. The older ward—wherever it came from, whoever put it on him—protected him against the Devil, and now it’s gone. The Devil expended some effort—some trickery—to get it dispelled. That must mean the Devil intends to harm him. To modify him. To modify him without consent. That just sounds bad. He wonders whether he’s just going to have his free will sluiced away, be turned into some kind of foot soldier for Satan.
So, okay, he doesn’t want to get modified, he can pretty much take that as a given. The solution is: run away. Get to safety. But he really has no idea where safety might be, or if any spot in the blank expanse is different from any other. Does it even make sense to run?