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Everything hurt and everything pissed her off.
The stupid endless grass. The stupid lukewarm air. The permanent blinding sun.
Charlotte wanted to hit something. But she didn’t. She didn’t have the strength to.
Charlotte coughed, wincing as she felt a bit more of her face crumble and drop onto the grass. Was it just her, or was she rotting faster than the first time?
It wasn’t as though she was scared. She knew what came After, now. She’d seen it for herself. Liam and Bryce and Amelia had all seen it too. No, she wasn’t scared of what came after life.
The right side of her head was crumbling, dry. Every breath she took filled her lungs with the sour taste of mildew. And her right eye oozed and dribbled disgusting droplets onto her face, the floor.
For a while, Charlotte tried to keep her head up.
Liam was working on a way to send them back. Oftentimes, his voice would ring through the air in that echoey, disconcerting way that Airy’s did, giving them a short announcement that he was making progress, that they might be going home soon.
And even when he was quiet on days on end, Amelia and Bryce and Atom and Subway Seat were company enough.
They’d talk, sometimes. Well, mostly Amelia and Bryce. About their lives, their families. Charlotte swore she probably knew more about Stella than she did about her own sister at this point. And sometimes when the other two were silent, lost in the bittersweet memories of their pasts, Charlotte would attempt to contribute what she could, and talked about her family, her job, spelunking, and her friends.
Parker.
The other four were silent when she told them about what she’d done. How she’d lied to him, manipulated him, squandered the mercy that he and her other friends had shown her.
Amelia had laughed awkwardly and shifted the topic.
Days meandered by, then weeks. And still they were trapped here. Unlike Bryce and Amelia, she had a timer ticking.
And that time ticked by. One day Charlotte found that she had once again lost use of her right arm. And the realization made her irritable, made her snap at Amelia when she offered to help her stand.
She isolated herself after that. She didn’t need to hurt another friend.
So she was once again lonely, feeling the nerves drain from her limbs, from her face inch by inch in isolation. And nothing really changed, actually. Only now instead of the irritating games that Airy would make them play, the silence was broken by Liam’s progress reports.
The increasing resignation in his voice made her heart sink each time.
She missed Circle. She wondered how he was doing, back at his old game show. She hoped he was doing better than she was.
Unlike last time, this time her self-imposed isolation was occasionally interrupted by the other former contestants, who would come by and attempt to make small talk. ‘How are you feeling, what’s up, how’s it going?” But it was always stilted, awkward.
Charlotte couldn’t blame them. She really hadn’t been the friendliest towards the other contestants during her time here. And they still tried their best to comfort her, which really only served to make what remained of her pride curl up angrily in her chest. They pitied her. Pity because they knew she had no chance of ever going back.
Because Liam couldn’t bring back the dead. How could Liam learn in seven months what took Airy a decade?
Sometimes Amelia would pat her back while she mumbled broken apologies. Apologies to her, then to Circle, to Subway Seat and Bryce and Atom, hell even the baby. She apologized to everyone she knew, everyone she’d ever known, about everything she’d ever done. And even though Parker would never hear, she apologized to him the most, feverishly, apologies that tore through her chest and heart, indiscernible mumbles that left her voice hoarse for days.
Soon she was nearly completely immobile. Mildew covered every inch of her body, creeping mushrooms cemented her to the ground. For a while the others would take turns flipping her, standing her up and walking her around to prevent this from occurring. But at one point she began to crumble too much for even that to be possible, so they let her lay there, becoming one with the wretched plane that she hated so much.
The mold had finally sealed her second eye shut. It was just her, alone, in the darkness.
She barely had the energy to respond to anything. Barely had the energy to lift her head when she heard someone walk by. And everyone else tried their best to accommodate her. Even Atom would soften his tone when talking to her, and at this point she had no dignity left to even be upset at their patronization.
Strangely, Charlotte began to crave when Subway Seat would come by to visit the most. He was the only one with the stomach to touch her, now, claiming that whatever mold she had couldn’t be worse than what the people of New York had spilled on him. ‘You get used to being stuck in one place all the time, you know? I was just in one place for four years. It wasn’t so bad.’
And maybe occasionally she would let him hold her as she sobbed into his cushions, cushions that smelled like washed out mustard, and petrol, and sweat, and anything but the lemony mildew stench that surrounded her, anything that could remind her of home. A home that she missed with every remaining fiber of her being.
They didn’t talk about it afterwards, although she knew the others knew anyway.
One day she was awoken from her painful slumber by an excitement all around her.
“Guys, I figured it out, I think! I did it!”
A cacophony of cheers. Charlotte could barely register the words being spoken, until she heard her own name being called.
“Charlotte! Charlotte, wake up! We’re going home! Liam figured out how to send us back.”
“Hold on, hold on.”
“I’ll call an ambulance for you, okay, Charlotte? You live in Georgia, right? I have your address. You’re going to be fine.”
“You guys are going? Am I still going with Amelia?”
“Yeah, I’ll send you back after I send back everyone else. I think I need to alter the code to do that, so I’ll figure that out after.”
“Amelia, you’ll come to visit, right? And uh, you too, Char?”
She couldn’t respond. Liam cleared his throat.
“Alright. I.. I wish you all the best.”
The grass beneath her shifted into polished hardwood.
And Charlotte was home. And Charlotte drew her last breath alone.