The King of No-one

I woke up at the bottom of a pit, buried in meat, bone, crushed skulls, and rotten, smashed plant matter, all of it working together to produce a smell that hit me like shock therapy. “Holy fuck.” I rubbed my forehead and sat up an inch before my body reminded me that was a mistake. That one had been big. All I remembered was a flash, a loud detonation of anger somewhere behind my ribs, and then something cracking, and then losing it. After that: screams, crying, and then the other kind of silence — the compressed, airless kind, like being buried alive inside your own skull. Underneath it, on a loop, quiet and unbothered: you gave up. You lost it. Again. Loser. Bloody fucking loser.Yeah. I really did. Another day, another village. That’s what my father used to say. A hundred people more, a hundred people less. s**t happens. I tried to stand. My legs didn’t agree with the plan, and neither did my hands when I put them down to catch myself. No coordination, no control — which meant one thing before I’d even gotten my eyes open properly: new body. Again. Nobody had asked me this time either. Nobody ever did. That was the annoying part. Losing my temper was one problem. The jumping was the other, and lately the two had started arriving as a set. Two years ago it was just the anger. Now the anger came with a free upgrade: waking up wearing whatever body had been standing closest when the lights went out in my head. Yesterday I’d been a werewolf. The day before, a vampire. Five weeks ago — and I want it on the record that I am not proud of this — I was a mushroom. Not a nice one. The kind that wants to end the human race one spore at a time. It’s still, to this day, the funniest thing that’s ever happened to me, and also the one that left me the angriest at humanity in general, which tells you everything you need to know about the emotional range of fungus. I’ve had real concerns about vegetarians ever since. Whatever’s going on in a brain that’s spent a lifetime eating plant-based monsters, I don’t want it happening in mine. I’d put money on some scientist, someday, writing a very serious paper about what long-term fungal exposure does to the human psyche, using history’s worst dictator as exhibit A. Hah. I got my knees under me this time and made it up onto two feet without falling back into the meat. Small win. I’d take it. The day promised to be quiet. Slow. Calm. I liked these days, when there was one — no need to rush, no need to plan, just enough peace to sit inside a new body and learn its habits and its wants, like breaking in a new pair of boots. I remembered how it used to confuse me, back when I was a kid — the first jumps, all those new feelings and reflexes and hungers arriving overnight while I stayed exactly me underneath them, until my dad found the words for it. It’s like a memory card, he’d said, going into a new camera. The camera’s new. Its lens, its settings, what it can and can’t do — all different every time. But the card that goes into it — the memories, the part that carries the information across — that stays the same. That’s where you live. That’s what doesn’t change. I’ve never been sure if my original self, the one still sitting on that card somewhere under two years of borrowed skin, is evil, or kind, or just pathetically hopeless and emotionally wrecked. No clue. They disposed of my first body the same day I got thrown into this world, so the only person who actually knows what I used to look like is whoever pressed the button that composed my bones into someone else’s. It doesn’t really matter. I’ve come to like it, if I’m honest — being a different thing every time I jump. It’s the one part of this that still feels like fun, like proof that life hasn’t fully finished being a boring piece of s**t yet. It’s genuinely funny, watching how differently every kind of creature handles the plain burden of staying alive. Guess who handles it best. Go on, guess. Mushrooms. Unbelievable, but a fact’s a fact. I climbed out of the pit — a new set of shoulders, decent reach, a heavyweight’s build under torn, borrowed clothes — and started walking before I let myself think too hard about what the pit was made of, or where all that meat used to be attached to people I probably knew by name. * * * I needed to get out of the open before anyone with working eyes and a rifle saw a blood-soaked stranger crawl out of a mass grave at the edge of what used to be a village. That was the whole plan for the next twenty minutes: get out of the open, find something to eat, and figure out, at a safe and comfortable distance, exactly how bad the last few hours had been. The place had been small even before the world went to hell — a farming cluster, maybe sixty houses, a well, a chapel with half its roof already gone from some storm nobody had gotten around to fixing. Now it looked like something had picked it up, shaken it once, hard, and set it back down at an angle. Roofs sagged into rooms. A cart lay on its side across what used to be the main road, one wheel still slowly turning in a wind I couldn’t feel. And everywhere — over the beams, up the walls, threading in and out of empty window frames like it owned the place — the plants. That part, at least, wasn’t my fault. The plants came from the Attack, whatever the Attack actually was — nobody left alive seemed to agree on the details, and I’d stopped asking, because every version of the story ended the same way: the world got smaller, meaner, and a lot more interested in eating people. Since then, anywhere humans used to cluster together got reclaimed within a year or two by something green, fast-growing, and mildly hostile. You learned not to stand still too long near a wall with vines on it. You learned the vines could hear you think about running. I found that out the hard way about six houses in. I’d stopped to check a kitchen with half a wall still standing, on the theory that anyone smart enough to survive this long kept a stash somewhere the plants hadn’t found yet, and I was elbow-deep in a cupboard when the floor near my boot twitched. Not wind. Not settling timber. A patch of the pale, veined creeper that had crawled in through the broken window sill flexed once, slow and deliberate, like a muscle deciding whether to bother, and then lunged for my ankle with a speed that had no business belonging to a plant. I got clear of it by exactly the width of a bad decision, throwing myself sideways into a shelf of dead crockery that came down around me in pieces. The creeper snapped shut on empty air where my foot had been a half-second earlier, then went still again, patient, coiled back into its corner like it hadn’t just tried to kill me. They only moved for heat and motion together — everyone knew that, in theory, the way everyone knows not to touch a stove, right up until they forget for one second and pay for it. I stayed very still against the wall, counting my own pulse, until the thing lost interest and settled back into looking like harmless ground cover. “Yeah,” I muttered at it, once my heart rate had come back down into double digits. “Charming place you’ve got here.” The cupboard, for what it’s worth, had nothing in it but a rusted tin of something that used to be food about a decade before the world ended. I left it. Some risks aren’t worth the calories. What got me, walking away from it, wasn’t the creeper. It was how little my heart rate had actually spiked. Three years ago a plant nearly taking my foot off would have had me shaking for an hour, replaying it, telling the story to anyone who’d listen. Now it barely rated a full adrenaline response — filed, forgotten, already three thoughts behind me before I’d finished walking past the next house. That was the part of this life nobody warned you about. Not the monsters. Not the hunger. The way the volume on everything kept getting turned down a notch at a time until one day you woke up in a pit full of your neighbors and the loudest feeling in your chest was mild annoyance at your own bad coordination. I checked pockets. I checked backpacks left behind by people who hadn’t needed them anymore. I gave the creeper’s corner of the street a very wide berth on my way past it. Nothing turned up worth carrying. Welcome to the hunger games, I thought, and smiled, because if I didn’t laugh at it I was going to have to feel it instead, and feeling it wasn’t on the schedule today. Somewhere under the smile, though, the counting had already started. It always did, eventually, whether I wanted it to or not. Sixty houses. Call it four to a house before the world thinned everyone out. Two hundred and forty, maybe. Minus however many had already run, or already died some other way, some way that wasn’t me. I stopped counting. Counting never once made it smaller. It never made it bigger either, which was somehow worse — a number was a number whether I let myself finish doing the math or not, and pretending I hadn’t finished was just another way of lying to the only person in the room who’d actually been there. I did have somewhere to go, at least. That was the one piece of luck in all this. Five years running, I’d held onto a shop on the far side of the ruined town nearest here — an old hardware store, tin roof, a door that still locked from the inside, and a generator I’d rigged to a string of neon signage some previous owner had left hanging behind the counter. My home. My shelter. My date night base, on the rare occasions there was a date and not just me and a candle and a bad mood. Nobody else got in. After the plants took the rest of the town, having four solid walls and a roof that didn’t leak had turned into the kind of luxury people used to reserve for actual royalty, and the ones still sleeping in doorways and drainage culverts had a name for me because of it. King of No-One. Said with a laugh, mostly. Sometimes not. I could see the neon from three streets out, blinking soft and stupid over the rooftops, and for the first time since the pit, something in my chest unclenched half an inch.