20. the road home

Billy opens his eyes and finds himself standing upright in a cave. This is a bit disconcerting as his last memory is of flaring pain and the slow empty sensation of falling backwards.

The bullet had hurt a lot. He remembers dying.

...actually, he remembers everything. Not just his death but every single bit of his life. From the pounding of his mother's heart before his birth on down to exactly what he'd written on his psych final his second year of university. Everything is just there in his head.

Curiously, he glances around. He's... in a line. Of people. Directly ahead of him is a woman with long curly brown hair. She smiles at him, but looks away and forward before he can ask her where they're going.

He knows where they're going. Well, he thinks he does.

Billy rubs his forehead. Good gods, how the hell had humanity managed to get that whacked out mythology right?

He stays in the line because it seems the thing to do. He doesn't know how long he's there, but when he reaches the front...

Well, he figures, I know when to admit that I'm wrong.

The ferryman, almost straight out of the illustrations from the scrolls his mother showed him as a child, blinks out at him. He is tall, wearing a dark robe that almost completely covers his face. His boat is, indeed, made of bones, and in the dark of the caves looks almost yellow.

Billy looks down and flinches at the images in the water. Reaching hands and wailing faces.

"Do you have passage?" The voice is ominous, fitting the surroundings perfectly. That's right. He needed payment to get where he was headed, wherever that was. Needed someone to have remembered him. Performed the funeral rites.

"I... I don't know."

"Why don't you check your hands, son?"

He looks down. In his open palm are two small copper coins.

Warmth blooms in his chest and for a split second he wants to cry. A memory, fuzzy and indistinct in a way that seems odd for all the clarity of mind death has granted him, surfaces. Warm lips on cold skin and a whisper. "For the river, Billy. May the gods protect you."

"Do you have passage?" Again, the boatman asks. Billy looks up, looks him straight in the eye. He might be crazy, but he thinks he sees humor in the face of the gloomy man before him.

Billy straightens, standing as tall as he can he offers out his hand with the two coins. "Will this do?"

The boatman turns up a corner of his mouth in almost a smile. "That's more than enough. Come on, boy. Let's go home then."

Not looking back, Billy steps into the ferry.