It made him feel sick.

As he passed an old Chevrolet pickup truck, something hissed at him from beneath the hood, urging him to step faster through the high grass.

“They’re mostly harmless.”

Eric turned to find an old man with a bald, sunburned head walking among the ruined automobiles.  He wore stained bib overalls over a flannel work shirt that looked far too hot for August.

“But you’d better trust me when I say you don’t want a closer look at them.”

Eric looked around, wondering where the old man had come from.  He was sure there hadn’t been anyone out here when he first entered the field.  “You’re Edgar?”

“I am.  And you?”

“Eric.”

“Eric,” repeated Edgar.  “You’re a damn idiot, Eric.”

Caught off guard, Eric could only think to say, “I’m sorry?”

“You must be.  To still be here, pushing on, after all you’ve been through already.”

Eric did not reply.  He was not insulted, really.  Given all that he had been through, given the horrors his dream had recently revealed to him, he found that he was inclined to agree.

Edgar strolled between two of the old vehicles, his eyes washing over them, a sad sort of expression on his face.  “A goddamned fool…”

Eric’s cell phone chimed.  He pulled it from his pocket and glanced at the screen.

CHARMING GUY

Looking up from the phone, he said, “I wanted to turn back at the farmhouse.  Grant Stolyen talked me out of it.”

“Goddamned fools, the both of you.”

Again, the phone chimed.

RUDE!

“You think I should leave now?”

“You won’t quit now.”

“I won’t?”

“If you haven’t quit by now, you ain’t going to.”

“Then what’s the point in telling me what an idiot I am?  I mean, if you know nothing you say will change my mind…then you’re just insulting me.”

The old man shrugged.  “Just stating my opinion.  I’m entitled to one, aren’t I?”

“I expect you are.”  Eric caught a glimpse of movement to his left and glanced over in time to see something dark and scaly crawl out of the engine of an old, hoodless Ford and drop into the tall grass below.  “We’re all entitled to our opinions.  Even us fools.”

“True.”

“I, for instance, am of the opinion that you’re something of an asshole.”

This time, when his phone chimed, it said simply, LOL!

The old man smiled a little.  “That so?”

“All of you,” Eric continued.  “You and Grant and Taylor, even that crazy-ass Annette.  You’re all here just to tell me what you think I need to hear to keep me moving.”

Edgar cocked a hairy eyebrow.  “I thought I was telling you to go home.”

“But you just told me that you know I won’t.”

“Because you’re an idiot.”

“No.  Because I know by now that I need to see what’s waiting for me in the cathedral.  I know it just as well as you do.”

Edgar moved on to another vehicle, his crooked fingers sliding over the rusty metal, almost lovingly.  He pulled open the door and peered at the ruined interior as if reminiscing about the days when this car would have been brand new and sitting on the lot, that new car smell wafting from its upholstery.  He did not respond.

“Is there even a chance I would’ve come here and needed you to encourage me to go on?  Or was I always going to have resigned myself to this by now?”

Edgar turned and looked at him now, his expression serious.  “There’s always a chance.  For everything.  You should remember that.”

Eric stared at him for a moment, at the softness of his eyes, the blemishes on his skin, the creases in his face.  Every detail was so vivid.  “How long have you all been dead?”

WHOA…

Edgar sighed and turned away.  Again, he placed his bony hand on the car.  “I’ll have been gone fifty-three years this winter.”

Fifty-three years.  That would’ve been around the winter of sixty-one.

“And the others?”

“Nearly as long.”

“I see.  And you’re all stuck here?  Just waiting on someone like me?”

“Not someone like you.  You.  You’re the one we’ve all been waiting for, the reason we carry on with our lives the way we lived them when we still lived, tending to things.  And waiting, of course.”

“But why?”

“We all lived our whole lives along the fissure.  And we all died along the fissure.  A lot of things don’t work right here, you’ve seen that for yourself.  Death comes here just like it does anywhere else.  A fatal heart attack is just as final in any world.  But what comes next…well, that’s a little different.”

“Are you stuck here forever?”

Edgar shrugged.  “Couldn’t tell you.  Haven’t been here forever yet.  I sure as hell hope I’m not.  I hope we get to move on when you finish what you came to do.”

“If I succeed.”

“If you succeed.”

Eric stared at the man as he moved on from one vehicle to the next.  It was difficult to grasp the idea that he was speaking to a ghost, even more difficult to believe that Taylor, Grant and Annette had all been nothing more than spirits.  They had all seemed so real, so tangible.  But now that he thought about it, they’d all appeared as if out of nowhere.  Though they had each interacted with their environments in some way—Annette had her laundry, Grant his tractor, Taylor his tools and Edgar these long-discarded vehicles—he hadn’t touched any of them himself.  Not one of them had offered to shake his hand.

One thing bothered him, though.

“What about Ethan?”

Edgar sighed.  “Annette’s still waiting for him to come home, isn’t she?”  He lifted the hood on an old Chrysler and peered in at the long-rusted engine.  “But he never came home.  Took a turn for the worst.  Died in the middle of the night while she was asleep at home.  Couldn’t accept it.  She died just a few months later, still refusing to believe he wasn’t coming home, and that’s how she exists now, always waiting for him to come back home to her.  She just couldn’t handle it.  She couldn’t take losing someone again.”

Eric recalled the way Annette talked to him about her father’s death, as if he weren’t a complete stranger.  It wasn’t hard to imagine how difficult it might be to keep losing people you loved so much.  “But why isn’t Ethan here with her?”

“Because he died in a hospital bed, some twenty miles away.  She died in her home, here in the fissure.  He moved on.  He escaped while the rest of us were trapped.  And poor Annette ended up trapped twice.  Once here in the fissure and once inside herself.”

THAT IS SO SAD!

It was sad.  It was probably the saddest thing Eric had ever heard in his life.  He felt terrible for poor Annette.

Edgar stood and silently stared at the rusted engine of the Chrysler as a scrounger wormed its way up and over the fender.  It looked like a cross between a lizard and a bug, about thirty inches long, with six frog-like feet on very short stubs of legs.  It had no tail and no neck, only a snake-like head with a wide, toothless mouth and great, blank eyes that, like the rest of its body, were a muddy brown.

The old man watched the creepy creature flop gracelessly into the grass.  “They ain’t got no teeth, but you still don’t want to get bit by one.  Their saliva’s toxic.  Might not kill you, necessarily, but it’d feel like your skin was on fire.  You’d have terrible hallucinations and there’s a good chance you could go blind.”

Now Eric’s skin was crawling.  His eyes swept the grass around him, alert for dark shapes creeping toward him.

Edgar grinned.  “Don’t worry.  They rarely bite people.  They mostly eat bugs and rodents.  You’d pretty much have to step on one to goad it into biting you.”

Eric still wanted to get out of the salvage yard and as far away from the scroungers as possible.

His cell phone buzzed inside his pocket, but he chose to ignore it.  He did not like the idea of further dividing his attention in a field full of venomous scroungers.  His luck today wasn’t the worst it could have been, seeing that he was still alive, but it also wasn’t the kind he’d want to take on a weekend in Vegas.