There is no air outside.

She lay with her back to the pavement, sucking in shallow breaths that can hardly be considered breaths at all, so heavy are her own lungs in her chest. There is no ceiling above her, but a pitch black sky, the only signs of civilization up there a few twinkling satellites so far from civilization itself. It smells. Of wet earth. And old fumes left to sink and stick to the road.

She sits up, but it hurts, and those heavy lungs of hers don't make it easy. Everything is lethargic. Things process slowly out here. To the left, a wide highway. To the right, a wide highway. She sits on two solid yellow lines, but there are four lanes total. And it's completely desolate.

Her eyes adjust to the night, or maybe the night adjusts to her eyes. In any direction there's field, hours of it, dead and endless, but not necessarily deadless. Even the highway fades into a speck far enough one way or dies with the crest of a hill far enough another. Street lights speckle it at equal increments. The asphalt purples like a bruise beneath them.

A palm brushes her forehead, presses in deep, searching for warmth. Maybe she's fallen with fever and she's hallucinating. It's too real to be a dream, too vivid, too lucid. Maybe this is reality. Some stork came and gathered her up in its talons, or maybe Dolly just morphed into her true form and flew away with her and dropped her off here. She turns her head again, and a wave of vertigo strikes her between the eyes. She squeezes them shut and moans. How in the ever-loving hell did she get here?

When she opens them again, the world has changed, and those deadless fields ring true. Transparent skeletons roam, skipping over cracked and withered corn stalks laying flat on the ground. Dry lightning strikes from a distant storm and lights the ground beneath their feet. They walk on the road too, and to the side of the road, and across the road. They are abundant; Lacey can't recall ever seeing quite this many bony fellas in one place before.

She also can't recall them ever looking at her head-on, but now the black pools where their eyes used to be bore into her. They've certainly stared before, but never with intent. There is intent in these hollows. A few of them approach her, and that's when she knows to be afraid.

Instead of ignoring her as they've always done, as they're meant to do by the laws of this quiet world she's come to understand over the years, they give her attention, and surround her from the back, circling. One bony fingertip prods the middle of her back and she yelps, moving in the one direction left unclogged by old worn-down spirits. Her legs tremble, but she doesn't pause despite the haze of confusion and disorientation stuffed into her ears like cotton.

There's an intersection several dozen feet away. Even beyond it, following every direction of the cross, there are no headlights, no twinkling of electricity in windows. She is completely and utterly alone with this crowd, all ushering her towards the same place. There's a string of traffic lights hung up, and all of them boast yellow. Other lights, more street lights, they're full of blinding white bulbs, like the new lights popped into downtown Carrick. What's odd about these ones is that they're not pointed at the pavement, but at one another, creating a big bright pool of light in the center of the intersection, where all roads, travelled or not, converge.

As she nears, the hum of the pool becomes clear, buzzing with energy. As she nears, the lights turn red, and her skin burns with the tint of it. The moment the switch occurs, there's a sound like everyone breathing their last breath. There is no breeze. The air goes still and her ears ring. It lasts an eternity. Could be seconds. Could be hours. It doesn't matter.

When she looks back, there are three dozen of them standing behind her, wavering, shifting their weight silently from leg to leg. They're waiting. Waiting with Lacey Waits. She swallows and turns back, chin raised so she can keep a close eye on the red. But no sooner has she trained her eyes on the harsh circle are her cheeks bathed in a deep green glow. Rich emeralds glitter on her skin - no, that's sweat. Damn.

Pressure throbs against her back. Hands on hands on hands - no, again. None of them are really touching her, but the way they press closer, well, her skin betrays her. Most of them take the green light and run straight into the middle of the intersection. Most of them take the green light and try to move her into the middle of the intersection. Something at the back of her head nags, they shouldn't be able to do this, they shouldn't be able to exert or impact or do anything. Still, she doesn't fight back.

She finally crosses under the traffic light and experiences the pool of light in all its blinding glory. It grows in strength, in wattage, until even the night sky above is colored a misty cream. In any direction, it's the only color she sees, a pale white like cataracts, like the film over Stella's eyes when she'd washed up. Limbs shiver, and soon those eyes are stuck over her own, and she runs. She runs to try and escape it, but in any direction she goes sprinting through the pupil, a grey tunnel. It's impossible, and a noise leaps from her throat, a noise she doesn't mean to make.

Eventually she just closes her eyes, but even though she wills her legs to stop, they don't.

Something brushes against her legs as she runs, something soft but prickly all the same. It reaches up to her thighs, and she feels it crunching underfoot as she pushes her way through the thriving mass. There's a breeze now, a powerful one, and it lashes the hair into her own eyes. It gives her a hard time opening them, but she catches colors: gold, blue, beige. She finds herself lumbering through a field, lush and full and undulating in the wind beneath a clear blue sky. And still, she can't stop running.

There's movement at the corner of her eye and suddenly she doesn't want to stop. A man reduced to nothing but skin and bones stumbles along, the overalls barely fitting his wiry frame; one strap slips off his shoulders, but he doesn't fix it, too dead-eyed to notice. He's a man of hollows and she's got no doubt that eventually the denim will slip off entirely and showcase an array of skinny ribs. The man offputs her, and she keeps running the way she was.

But this way, she sees a woman clear up ahead, pale and donned in dull Victorian wear. Palms press to her eyes, one gripping a stained handkerchief, and she weeps openly. She, too, doesn't seem to care where she's going. Lacey hitches a breath and changes directions, but this way, a uniformed man looks straight through her, the buttons on his vest rusted with the blood from a bullet scattered into his chest. He marches on, left-right-left, alone.

Lacey whirls, but she's finally stopped dead in her tracks when she sees a little girl a mere ten feet away, so short she nearly disappears in the wheat. Her dress is pink, and she grips a teddy in her hand while mousy brown hair flutters in front of her face, loose from a dangling bow. There's something awfully familiar about her, and Lacey can't help but think this one must've wandered too far from home and never found her way back. It sullens her heart.

The echoing blare of the train's horn revives it. It thumps in her chest, pounding, bum-bump, bum-bump, and she whips her head to the left to watch the train fly past. Its mechanical bits and pieces screech in conjunction with one another, skidding down the tracks with heavy thumping, bum-bump-bum-bump-bum-bump. The horn blares again, and she can't help but hear the warning it declares: "Keep careful watch over your children, lest the water decides to take them!"

There's a face in one of the windows. Plump, blonde. The girl presses a hand to the glass. With horror, she recognizes it as her own, and with a warbled yell, she backs up. Her heel catches on a mound of dirt and she goes flying to the ground. On the way down, she looks to the little girl for help. Lacey blinks. The girl is gone. She collides with the earth.

Funny; the earth splashes.

One second the sky is there, the next it's gone and she's sinking fluidly, engulfed. Her hands move to try and push herself back up but they flail. In any direction, there's nothing but foggy green water, and it continues to darken with time. Her eyes dart; she catches sight of her own pale arms. Miniscule bubbles collect on the hairs, and she guesses they're likely building on her cheeks and forehead and eyelashes too. A chunk of grass floats by. This water is dirty. She needs to get out of it.

But when she looks up, there's no surface to be seen. She kicks herself up, reaching out in hopes her fingers might break water, but nothing. Her heart begins to waltz and she realizes that she's holding her breath and can't take another. Fuck. Oh, fuck.

There's movement to the side, and the oh fucks continue. She tries to swim away, but this movement is everywhere, these bony fellas, twitching and wavering with the water, their soft illuminations trailing behind them. They move as comfortably as fish in water and a couple of them swim to her side. She doesn't expect them to reach out and wrap their skeletal fingers around her arms, but they do, and she's struck with a shock of cold. She kicks out and tries to wrench away, to no avail. Another swims up to her. They stare one another down for a moment. Then it grabs her face with both of its rough hands.

"Swim," it puts into her mind, a clear, loud word that exists more as a feeling. The others must hear it too because each and every carpal leaves her skin and they swim away, all in the same direction, kicking down. She tries to follow, or maybe she tries to get as far away as possible, but regardless of what she tries to do, she only winds up flailing and floundering, spinning into the void, rolling upside down and rightside up and in endless circles.

Bubbles fly every which way and for every bubble there's a flicker of beige. Moths swim with her, fluttering all around and disorienting her even further. It's a chaotic splurge and she doesn't know which way is up or down or left or right and she thinks maybe it'd be easier to just let go of all this air in her lungs and just die, right here, right now. It burns. It burns bad.

"Find me, Miss Waits." It reverberates through the liquid to find her this time. The voice is gentle, girlish, but not too young. It dashes away those previous thoughts about filling up with water. "I'm over here."

"Where?" she wants to ask, but now there's fear; now she's afraid of the death pressing down on her.

Still, through the flood come those welcome words, welcome only because it means she's not alone down here: "Dead. Find me, Miss Waits."

The water cools and calms, and so too do her movements. When she tries to swim towards the voice, she's able to go the way she wants, and soon she's down, down, much farther down than she'd have ever liked. A few of the bony fellas float down here, and their bodies help illuminate the area, turning the dark liquid into a fogged, dusty dark green she can only sort of see through.

She nears the bottom. Her knees dig into rotten sludge. Eyes sting; she blinks. There's no light here anymore. She tries to kick off, to swim into the open again, but her shoulder crashes into a wall. Knots twist her gut. She pushes away from the wall, but she cracks her forehead on another. Hands reach out, but on either side of her is a barrier, and in front, and behind. The terrible realization that she's confined on all four sides in a cramped cube dawns on her, and a terror fills her throat that almost opens it up but she screws her lips tight. She can get out of this. She can.

She presses her hands to the walls and they creak but don't give. The creaking is a good sign; she presses her back against one wall and kicks out, then kicks again, driving her foot into the wall over and over. It groans back at her, unmoving. Fuck. Once she throws her entire body against it. Still nothing. She sweeps her hands through her floating mass of hair. There's crap all in it. She tugs, tugs, tugs, fuck, fuck, fuck!

"You're so close, Miss Waits. Don't give up. But hurry. You're running out of time." Oh, she doesn't need to be told that. Her lungs are about ready to give. She'll die today. She'll die in the next minute. She'll die.

She floats backwards, hopeless, but she doesn't bump into the wall. She bumps into something else. Curious, she turns around. There is light again, sparse but clear. A fresh face stares back at her. Small features, layered with those same miniscule bubbles she'd seen on her arms. Red hair floats away from her eyes and she finds them piercing into her. Ro-Anne.

"You've found me, Miss Waits."

A skeleton hand makes a grab at her shirt and she screams, all the painful air she'd held in her chest rushing out at once. She jumps out of the crouch she was in and emerges from the water. A sharp gasp fills her throat and everything comes out hoarse, like she's just come back to life. Her head is heavy. The surface of the water is frothy. She continues gasping for air but finds herself choked up by the foul odors emanating from the pool.

It's dark, but she allows herself time to breathe, to recover. But then she remembers Ro-Anne, remembers that she shares this small space with a body. She thinks she starts crying but she can't tell. Something flutters against the wetness on her cheeks and the flap of its wings is loud. She follows the noise. There, it flies and lands next to a crack near the ceiling. It's so thin she would've missed it otherwise, but light comes through, and she knows it's day. Maybe that means people are out and someone will hear her.

"Help me!" she shrieks, but halfway through she needs to take a break and another breath. She pounds on the wall. "Help me!"

It happens in a rush. The oxygen she's been trying so hard to reel into her body leaves all at once. Her head snaps back and it feels like everything breaks. No, like she's shorn free of her body. She's sucked through that little crack and it feels like a thousand splinters enter her soul but then she's flying, blinded by sunlight, through a house half submerged. She's sucked out of the house, into what used to be a yard but now's only an algae-crusted mass of water. She's sucked further out, into the air, above Carrick. Over the cliffside. Over her neighborhood. Over her background. Through the smallest, sparsest crack in her window. Into her room.

Someone inhales. She tries to fly away, but she's sucked down someone's throat so fast she hardly has time to process it's her own.