The street was littered with corpses.
I turned around to return to the saloon, suspecting that I was in for more fun.
The building had vanished. In its place lay an unending field of lifeless bodies. Some were mere skeletons with hardly any flesh at all. Others looked fresh. Most of them were in a condition somewhere in between, exuding that ripe putrescence that someone described as "the sickly sweet stench of freshly baked bread."
Only this smelled far worse. It choked the lungs and gagged the throat.
Animals and beasts of all kinds lay mixed in with the people. The flies might have gorged themselves if there had been any. Scattered over the corpses, though, were the husks of dead insects. Nothing lived. Nothing moved.
Except for whatever was making that repulsive smell. And me.
And one other… person.
Of course.
He dragged the body of a woman across that of a man in an attempt to lay them together, arm in arm. The woman's left arm separated at her shoulder, though, and he was forced to arrange the vignette as best he could.
"Fnord," he said. His gaze lifted to meet mine.
He was squat, scraggly, and covered with oozing boils. Clad only in a few rags, he waddled across the charnel morass barefooted.
"What do you want?" His voice was as harsh as sandpaper on a sunburn. "You're not supposed to be here. You're not rotting!"
"Is this hell?" I asked.
He stared at me as if I'd asked him if it were the Chinese Theater. Grubby-no, slimy-fingers smeared a few grey strands of long, matted hair away from his eyes.
"Of course this isn't hell, you stupid tit. There isn't any hell or heaven. You don't go anywhere when you die. Except maybe underground." He picked up a finger from one of the more advanced cases of decay and waved it at me. "And mind you not to start asking me about souls, you ignorant bastard. Your soul dies with you!"
"Energy," I repeated from high school physics, "can neither be created nor destroyed. My mind is electrochemical energy that cannot be destroyed. It's my soul, and it's got to go somewhere."
The squat little man (if it was a man) sat on the withers of a deceased horse. Its ribs caved in with a crunch and a sigh. He jumped up cursing.
After brushing away the excess putridity, he said, "Thermodynamics, eh?" He hefted a pair of bloated, purplescent bodies one on the other, then climbed atop to straddle them.
"All right," he said, "where does the memory of a pocket calculator go when you switch it off?"
"Huh?" I think I preferred playing Three Card Monte with the Stranger. The smell was getting to me.
"The electrons that form the number pattern in the calculator aren't destroyed when you switch it off. Where does the memory go? Silicon Heaven?"
I shrugged. "It must go somewhere."
He jumped off the bodies to land on some dead puppies. "It goes nowhere! The electrons remain, but the pattern is destroyed."
"My soul's a pattern?"
"Your mind is an electrochemical ordering that is built up over time. Ten, thirty, fifty years. Oh, sure-the constituents of that ordering remain after your death, but the order itself begins to disintegrate in the absence of oxygen and electrical current. The pattern randomizes, and your soul dies with you!"
"Mighty deep philosophy for a caretaker."
"And why not? I've eaten some of the best minds here. I've breakfasted on Buddha, lunched on Leibniz, noshed on Nietzsche, and munched a Messiah or two. They all come here. They're dead and their souls are, too. So I eat their brains and-oops." He glanced sheepishly in my direction.
"And they live on in you."
"Oh, shit."
"And back on earth," I said, watching him sink his head in his hands, "people's souls live on in the things they've done, the people they've touched."
"Only metaphorically!" he retorted with a shake of his tired grey head.
"Metaphors are all we need." I bent over him. "I'm only a simile of my genetic code. Our image of God is only a crude, externalized metaphor of the ineffable processes of our minds."
All those obscure philosophy books were coming in handy now. He looked up at me with pleading eyes.
"Leave me alone. Give me back my nothingness."
A voice shattered across the endless, carcass-strewn plain.
"Who?" it demanded to know. "Who disturbs My perfect serenity? Who disturbs My eternal peace?"
"Me?" I asked.
"This is My dominion. All men come to rest here!"
The little caretaker fearfully burrowed to hide under a woman's body that dripped a blackish goo. His terrified quivering shook the nearby corpses.
He appeared.
He wore a doctor's outfit, entirely black. Even the mirror strapped to His forehead reflected ebon darkness from some hideous realm of shadow.
Glossy black gloves dripped blood in ceaseless vermilion rivulets.
I was in luck. He was only a few miles high this time.
"All the creatures of the air and beasts of the sea," He said as if repeating a creed. "All that walks and runs and crawls and breaths. All that lives or has lived. All come here and end. All things stop here. Nothing moves. This is rest. This is Eternity."
I gazed about unimpressed. "Sort of like a Republican Convention, then."
He didn't laugh. "Even humor dies here," He said. He held His hands at His side so that the blood ran down His legs in stripes as wide as those of a hotel bellboy's.
"But things that die," I said, "return to the earth. They may decay, but they are consumed to become part of new life."
"Forget the earth. It too shall someday die."
"To become part of a new world."
"All worlds shall end," He droned on. "The universe shall die."
I took a gamble. It was a cosmological shot in the dark, but I had to try it.
"The universe shall die," I agreed with a placating spread of my hands, "and shall give birth to a new one." By now I had almost forgotten the stench and the bodies surrounding us. I had Him on the defensive.
"Forget birth. It is an illusion of the Moon. Her doing. Nothing is born. There is only change."
"If nothing is born, nothing can die." I watched Him for evidence of any chinks in His armor. There were plenty.
"Change can stop!" He shouted, clenching and releasing His fists so that blood squirted out between the fingers of His slick gloves.
"To stop change is in itself a change. A change in change."
That got to Him. He flung His arms around in wide, haphazard motions.
"Forget change! There is only Death! Death and nothing thereafter!"
"I'm alive," I said quietly. I waggled my fingers at Him just to prove it. "I was born. Plants and animals were killed, fed to me, and converted again into living substance. That's what life is-change. Death is change, but it too leads to life and birth. It's a never-ending-"
"Don't say it!"
He screamed and threw His hands in front of Him. The blood dripped from His elbows. He jerked His head so that the mirror dropped in front of His face.
I said casually, "I was only going to say that it was a cycle-"
"No!"
"Like a wheel."
He shrieked the most horrifying yell I'd ever heard. The blood on His gloves curdled.
I had Him on the run.
"Ever-turning," I continued, "around and round. Circular. No beginning, no end-"
He stumbled backward over a mountain of corpses. The sky reddened to the same hue as before. A breeze whipped up behind me, carrying a scent of pomegranates and apples.
"Stop!" He cried pathetically. "They're Mine! I keep them from the Wheel. I guard them from rebirth. Here, in My Land of Never-Change!"
"Even You," I said, "are part of the Wheel." I grew to match His height. The wind blew even stronger. "Gods are born, and They die. Their influence waxes and wanes. You have reached Your own particular end."
"No!" He shouted, seeming to shrink away from me. The blood on His hands dried to brownish streaks. The wind seemed not to push at either one of us, yet the top layer of bodies began to roll with its force. They bounced past our legs. He tried to grab for them, to hold on to them.
"No, no, no! You've invoked the Winds of Change!"
The skeletons and carcasses flew by in a blur. The Winds lifted them up into the red sky, where each one disintegrated slowly, beautifully. The infinite plain had been swept clean of Death. Somewhere on the sweet-smelling Winds rang the gentle sound of pentatonic chimes.
The blood on His arms and hands caked and flaked away. His black gloves peeled off to reveal smooth, hard, cadaverously white skin.
A hand with long green fingernails reached around from behind me to slap a golden sickle into my grasp. I threw it forward with all my might.
It sailed on the Winds to ram into His chest, where it stuck and slipped down an inch. Out of the gap flew a thousand butterflies of every color imaginable.
"I wanted peace," He whimpered, crying tears that dissolved His hard face. "Peace, not life-in-death."
He devolved. He became an ape, a reptile, a fish, a pile of bluegreen slop. From somewhere came His voice-astonished, but sad nonetheless. It was as if He had discovered something that had eluded Him for aeons. Something that He had discovered all too late.
"Not a circle," He mused. "A helix! An ascending helix!"
Behind me, far away, a woman laughed. Where the corpses once had lain, new things began to grow in abundance.
Amongst it all, the old grey man sat pining.
"Now whose brains have I got to pick?"
"There's always your own," I said.
Just about then, the missile hit us and blew the world into a billion flinders.