The tower creaked and moaned with every breath of the wind, but it hadn’t fallen yet. Neither had we. A small mercy. In fact, we’d got on somehow, this girl and I. It was almost like spending a quiet moment with Dorothy. Almost. Only a Dorothy with a tactician’s mind, always on alert, suspicion in her eyes as Turlo came and went, and I sifted through old memories laid waste at my feet.

Let nothing stand in your way.  Bring your Nimma the Ruby Slippers.  Bring back your lover.  Let no one stand in your way. Do what you do, Nick. Chop.

She reached out her fingers, careful not to move too much and wake the sleeping beast, and felt the soft down of her lover. Just at his waist she could feel it give way to naked skin, warm and alive like a real man, but vibrating ever so slightly, so satisfied, a rich, easy purr that made the mattress gently tremble, a soothing melody that filled the dark room.

e stared off into nowhere a long time, then he blinked and his eyes shifted to pieces of coal, then eyes again, the color fading until there was nothing but a ruddy texture to his face. “I’ll help you,” he said. “I’ll guide you. The land is dangerous, but I still know its bones.”

“And when we get to the slippers?” I asked.

Another smile. More subtle this time. “We return Oz to what it once was. Your grandmother loved it.”

I bent down to pick up one of her silky, satin robes from the floor intending to hang it back up. I couldn’t help but bring it up to my nose to smell her. Man… her scent so good. She never would tell me what perfume she wore, although I suspect it was one of her own concoctions. I always thought it funny how the smell of a woman could incite so much arousal in a man. I felt my pants tightening.

If you’ve never been chased through a decaying city by the animated corpses of your former subjects, I wouldn’t recommend it. Especially not when they’re moving faster than dead people have any right to, and especially not when a sentient fog is herding them toward you like some kind of morbid sheepdog. But maybe, just maybe, this was my comeuppance. My due. The Unseen God, after all the years of soaking my head, playing its final card and giving me what I’d so deserved on that fateful day.

“I’ve waited so long,” she says, laying beneath me. Her hips rise to meet me, her legs encircling mine. I feel heat. I feel hunger. My hands, my hands—fingers once forged in fire—dig into the flesh of her thighs and come away damp, sticky, red.

But still I do not stop.

Because this is what I wanted. Because I cannot stop.

Central Munchkinland remains in a heightened state of alert as the mysterious purple fog this station reported two days ago enveloped the villages of Bright Lettins and Old Pastoria. Reporting is spotty still, and there is no direct connection with either town, but reports are coming in that Old Pastoria is in flames and Bright Lettins is a ghost town.

The wind howled like voices outside. My stomach growled, and I longed for the river again and its cool, crisp water. I kept hearing footsteps, laughter, a moan—but that had to be the wind playing through the crevices and cracks, the open windows and broken doors of the balconies, all the sores of a dying creature breathing its last. Once or twice, I could swear I heard a breath catch in the walls. A wet cough. But I told myself it was the wind. Just the wind.

A moment later there was a scrape on the side of the car, and Cob turned and saw them, eyes burning, mouths like great black holes. His hand inched back and wrapped around the handle of the well-polished spade. “Every ear, Smalls,” he muttered. “Every ear.”

“The bleeders lie to us. The bleeders cheat us. The bleeders have no respect for us, nor any remorse. The bleeders hate and use us. The bleeders have to go.”

Their target was true, the scent pure.  It wasn’t oil and grease they tracked.  It wasn’t the sound of moving gears or shifting metal.  It wasn’t the tramp of small feet in failed unison over packed snow and rock.  None of these things were detectable to the black shapes as they came on over the ice, racing to gorge themselves.  As they neared the little army, the scent that drove them, the very essence they fed on, grew stronger and stronger, emboldening them to propel themselves faster and let loose their shrill cries of hunger.

I stood staring at the now solid glass and watched myself as I licked my paw clean of his blood, but the image staring back at me in the glass was of a man: long blonde hair flowing over his shoulders, sharp chiseled facial features, blazing blue eyes. My paw a hand with long fingers. Fully human. A man. His actions mimicked mine, his human, blood-stained hand brushing against his tongue. I couldn’t pull my eyes away. That man is who I longed to be. She would love me then.

I’d inhaled death before, seen the dead in numbers unimaginable—countable with my brains, and yet I’d been unable to count them. The TikTok Army had swept into the Emerald City on a cold winter morning, what once was a gleaming light leading the way from above, hovering there in her protective travel bubble, eyes bright with madness. The “bleeders,” they called them. That was the term the tiktoks had used as they slashed and hacked their way through my own forces, overwhelming the main guard force with ease. As each little tinny soldier fell, another stepped into his place while a host of tiktok medics conducted rapid repairs and put the little fuckers back into play.