Chapter 6: The End of the Beginning

Soon after Nny latched onto the back of a car, the once sluggish traffic sped up as the bus and the next few cars turned right off the highway. Devi saw him and jumped two cars toward him and onto the same 60s van he was behind earlier. Nny leaped ahead on the same van so he was facing her.

"Why don't you just give up you wacky little freak? You know you can't stop me without hurting one of your friends, not to mention yourself. I'm almost powerful enough to possess you and control you. Soon enough you'll be nothing more than a pile of rotting flesh like your stalker, Tim. Not that you aren't that low already."

"But why are you doing this? You have me! That's what you wanted! But you've unleashed something that even you can't control! You can barely keep track of three victims, never mind the hundreds or thousands that your disease could spread to!"

"I'm doing this to get rid of all you "different" people. You're so annoying! Why can't you be just like everyone else?! We're better than you anyway!" Then it occurred to Nny. Why didn't he think of it before? The dream had proved to be more of a prophecy, as his plan would once again require him and maybe a few others to die. But still, there might always be the swan disguised as an ugly duckling in the group of doomed individuals it would require.

"Okay. If everyone like you is better than everyone else, prove it. I'll make a deal with you. In this van there is a football team that looks like your clones. If you leave Devi and infect all of them, treat them the same as you would treat any other host. If they live, you live. If they die, you will die with them because they won't be able to infect anyone else. Are you in? Or are you too chicken to follow through?" Nny hated the thought of using reverse psychology. But it was his only option.

"I'm not a coward! You are soooo going down for that!!" He made Devi climb down inot the van through an opening in the top. He made sure everyone inside was infected, then left her. One of the players got confused, pushed the steering wheel and drove the van through the guard rail on the side of the highway and off a cliff, into the ocean full of water that couldn't have been warmer than the high 30s. Nny knew that this time he probably wouldn't be allowed to come back. But it was what he had wanted all along. He never wanted to live. The dream truly was a prophecy because not only did he recover memories from his past, but also one he didn't quite understand. It didn't fit anywhere in his past, so he had never fully been able to comprehend it until it started to become reality. He realized that he had seen this all before in the dream along with a flood of memories from his past. He wondered why he could see things into the future from the past, but didn't have time to think about that.

"Wait! Devi!" he thought. Below him he saw the van sinking deeper into the ocean. He saw the football team swim to the surface and dove down to pull Devi from the front seat. On the cold, wet sand, Devi still wasn't moving. He checked her pulse and felt only a faint heartbeat. He saw that the football players would soon die along with Stan. But so would he. Nny welcomed it, as he knew now that if the vision came to him of ever talking to Devi again, it would show only more rejection. Nny knew that wherever he was going, the same things that tormented him now would continue in some way. "Oh dear. Out of all the places to die, could I at least have had some way to let someone know my thoughts?" Back in his mind, he saw a memory of a much younger version of him writing his name in the sand. "Of course." He picked up a stick and wrote in the beach by far the most important thing he had learned throughout all his journeys through Heaven and Hell and everything in between.

"Death is never the end."