Page 5 of Sequel to the Easter Bunny

I don’t trust it.

“No thanks.” I say under my breath.

The last thing I want to do is step out into the heat that radiates in to me.

But the old gods were never going to let me choose. Not really.

The wall at the back of the lift presses forward, and I have no choice but to move. No choice but to step out into the glaringly hot brightness of the desert in front of me.

Sand leaks into my shoes, but I leave them on. Trekking through this domain in heels with a little sand inside is better than walking barefoot over this scorched desert.

The lift disappears as soon as the doors close, and I look in all directions, making sure I don’t forget which way the lift pointed me originally.

There’s nothing and no one in this vast, blank space.

No one but me.

Nothing but the vague shapes of distant saguaro cacti, rusty brown against the rolling white dunes.

Nothing…. but a glimmer of a mirage on the horizon.

Raising my hand to shade my eyes, I squint at it, trying to will my vision to adjust. It could be a trick, or it could be my only chance at salvation.

There’s no real option. The choice is: move forward, or stay here and turn into a crispy corpse.

The blinding white heat that radiates from overhead isn’t the sun, and I can only hope that means I won’t burn.

Bunny mask tan lines sound like a walking punchline.

Slogging through the soft sand is exhausting in this heat.

I’m sweating before I make it to the first cactus.

But when I do, a chill races over my skin despite the heat.

The shrivelled, prickly flesh at the base of the cactus wraps up and around the legs of a man who isn’t dead, but looks like he wishes he was.

His face is dried, his lips chapped beyond bleeding, and his listless eyes watch me. They’re the only part of him that moves aside from the shallow rise of his chest.

Whoever he was… whatever he did or asked for… the old god who accepted his bargain was far crueller than anything I’ve seen, even in the recountings I’ve found in the tower library.

These are the horrors that live inside the stories grandmothers tell their tiny charges as a warning. This was why you didn’t come seeking favours.

I shiver, even as a breath of hot wind brushes over me.

Looking in the direction I’ve been headed, what I thought might be a mirage very definitely isn’t…

It’s real, and now I dread reaching it.

But there’s no other choice.

I pass a dozen other men slowly drying into cacti before I step onto a stone terrace that seems to float over that sand. The remnants of a broken temple.

Back on level footing, I pretend that the only reason I pause is to shake the sand out of my shoes. But as the white granules flutter to the ground, swirled around by the wind, I search every corner of the visible oasis for some sign of the god whose mercies I’ve been left to.

Oasis isn’t the right term.

There is water here, but nothing is alive save for the sharp, ugly forms of cacti—real ones, this time. They resemble the ones I’ve seen in cultivated gardens and in films, but the spines are definitely longer… and they move, almost as if they aren’t actually connected to the ground from which they sprout.

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