Chapter 1: The Man with the Hole in His Head

VOLUME ONE: DEATH IS A MANY SPLENDORED THING

The world would be a lot better off if all the dead people would stop pretending they weren’t dead.

My name is Zachariah Thornwood, but everyone, even my parents, calls me Zack. A few months ago I was a normal fourteen year old kid obsessed with movies and baseball and girls. Not necessarily in that order. And now?

Now I live life with the knowledge that there are a ton of dead people running around thumbing their noses at the whole idea of the Circle of Life. They could be anyone: the postman, the Mayor, the kid bagging your groceries, or the weather woman on TV. They seem perfectly normal, act perfectly normal, live perfectly normal lives, but are, in fact, perfectly dead.

I wasn't born with this grim knowledge, of course. I learned it, and not by choice. A quasi-deranged Hunter of the Dead sort of thrust this all upon me when it suited his purpose. Not the nicest thing to do, but Xander - sorry, I mean Mr. Moon - isn't always the most conscientious individual. But I'm getting ahead of myself.

It all started one Thursday evening after baseball practice.

I play second base, which is generally where they put the kids who were shortstops before a better shortstop came along. I don’t entertain any fantasies of playing in the major leagues some day, but I love the game and would play for free if they’d let me.

Anyway, on this particular Thursday we’d just finished up some infield drills, and the coach had called it a night when I made the second worst decision of my life. Not that I had any idea that it was a bad decision, and to tell the truth, the decision, itself, wasn’t really bad, nor was it at all unusual. But it did lead to everything that has happened since, so I figure it’s fair to say this was a monumentally bad decision.

“Hey Zack! You want a ride home?” Asked Gary Greenburg, our starting left fielder and one of my oldest friends. His Mom had swung by after work like usual in time to give Gary a ride home. I only lived a couple of blocks from him - closer than that if I hopped over his back fence when his parents weren’t looking and crossed through the Burtons’ yard like we’d both been doing since we were about six - but lately I'd been walking home on my own to have some time alone with my thoughts.

“No thanks. I’m gonna walk,” I answered. “I’ve got some thinking to do.”

He rolled his eyes at me, knowing full well what I was ‘thinking’ about. “Whatever. Later!”

And just like that, I’d forever altered the course of my life.

Gary jogged out to the parking lot to meet his Mom, and I turned the other way and walked towards the woods. It really isn’t that long a walk from the ball field to home—-maybe half a mile. I could generally cover that in ten minutes. You just cut through the woods and you’d find yourself a couple blocks from my street. Driving actually took longer, because you had to go all the way around the woods. Same with riding your bike, but of course nobody biked anymore. Somewhere around middle school, biking became really dorky, so kids who had been spending hours zooming through town on their two-wheelers were suddenly hoofing it or begging rides from their older brother.

Since my only sibling was my nosey brainiac of a little sister, my choices were limited. I hung my glove on the end of my bat, leaned it up over my shoulder, and entered the woods.

Now when I say woods, I suppose I ought to be more specific. I wouldn’t want you to imagine some sort of majestic wonderland of mighty oaks and rabbits and stuff. It’s more like a large, empty space that has no development value whatsoever due to its relative inaccessibility. It’s been left alone for decades, and trees have sprouted up and taken root, and nature has done a pretty serious job claiming it for its own. When we were younger, we spent countless hours in there, letting the woodland-ish setting substitute for everything from Hogwarts’ Forbidden Forest to Kashyyyk (the Wookie Home World, duh) to the heart of the African Jungle to anything else we could dream up. You can lose yourself in our woods, but you can’t really get lost. I’ve always felt connected to our woods, though I couldn’t tell you why. I just feel comfortable in there, always walking the same path, hopping over the same exposed roots, passing the same trees. It feels like home.

Not that I don't have a home, of course. I live in a boring two-story house on a boring street in the town of Boringville (though Google Maps calls it Dubarton) with my sister, my Mom, and my Larry. In case you're wondering, Larry's not my Dad, he's the guy my Mom's been married to for about ten years. He's a good guy, and has been in my life for as long as I can remember, but... well... he's Larry. My Dad died in a car accident when I was two years old. The only memories I have of him are images that more than likely I've pulled from old photo albums and claimed as my own.

Oddly enough, I always feel closest to him when I'm walking through the woods.

But that Thursday after practice, it was something much more current than my long-dead father that led me to walk under the trees. Her name is Zoe Francis.

Zoe moved into the school from out of state a couple of months ago. She’s kinda short, with jet-black hair that someone, I’m pretty sure her mother, convinced her to color with a couple of pink stripes. If you saw her on the street, you’d think she was some sort of weird, moody chick who listens to loud, angry guitar bands with singers who blame their parents for everything. But that’s not who she is. I think it’s who her mother was when she was our age. Instead, Zoe is funny, fearless, and happy to be alive. And she’s totally, totally hot.

I’d like to say that my ‘thinking’ in the woods consisted of meeting up with Zoe and just making out. But the truth is, we weren’t dating, we were just friends. In fact, if I didn’t get my act together, I was in danger of being labeled a ‘Friend’ forever and locked away in the Friend Box while she wasted her wiles on an assortment of lesser guys. So that’s what I was doing in those woods that Thursday evening. Working on how I was going to jump out of the Friend Box and ask her out. Problem was, as Gary knew, I was kinda stuck on how to make my move. I’d been walking and ‘thinking’ about this for about three weeks now.

As I entered the woods, my mind once again went through every permutation of my asking Zoe out and her rejecting me. Sometimes she laughed at me. Sometimes she just shook her head sadly. Sometimes she ran screaming. Try as I might, I couldn’t imagine a scenario that ended well. I was so caught up in my teenage angst I walked completely past the guy in the ratty sports coat before noticing he had a hole through his head.

Four or five steps past, I stopped. The portion of my mind in charge of getting me home without being run over by a car or walking into a tree was waving its arms at the rest of me, trying to get my attention. I blinked a couple of times, not really believing what I thought I had just seen. Did that guy really have a hole through his head? I momentarily and very carefully put Zoe aside in my head - I’d be returning to her in a moment - and turned back around.

He was walking aimlessly back and forth, muttering softly to himself, his hand out in front of him like a divining rod. Check that. Most of his hand out in front of him. The guy only had three fingers. That was weird, but not as weird as the fact that he had a massive hole in his head where his left eye should have been - a fact I was able to confirm even though he was currently facing away from me, because I could see through the back of his head.

“Trees... no trees... messing with me... too many trees.”

Apparently he had a thing against trees. Which must have sucked for him, being in the middle of the woods and all. It was at this point that I did the second really monumentally stupid thing that evening - this one possibly worse because, well really, most people would suggest that the only thing to do when meeting a man with a hole in his head is run fast and run far.

“Oh my God, there's a hole in your head!”

Just call me Captain Obvious.

Hole-In-Head-Guy turned at the sound of my voice, his one eye zeroing in on me and my two eyes zeroing in on the hole where his other eye should have been.

“Too many trees!” He cried out, as if the trees were an infestation of mold along the bottom of his basement walls. Every muscle in my body tensed and prepared to flee, but I overruled them all and just stood there, my mouth hanging open like I was a baby bird waiting for my mother to regurgitate my breakfast. Hole-In-Head-Guy didn’t seem to care, just went about his business waving his hand around and muttering about the audacity of trees to show up in an empty, wooded lot.

It’s right about at this point that, all mistakes aside, I may have had a shot to get out of this with my sanity intact. I could have listened to the sound advice my entire body was sending me and raced off. After a few seconds, I could have blocked out all memory of Hole-In-Head-Guy and filled my mind with far more pleasant matters that didn't involve a homeless guy with a hole in his head and eight fingers. Zoe, for example, would have been a fantastic topic to devote my attention to. The way her hair falls over her face blocking her left eye most of the time, for one thing. The way she doesn’t have a hole in her head, for another.

Instead I stood rooted to the spot- frozen in a quaint mixture of terror and terror- and watched him go about his business until he finally let out a whoop of glee and turned his half-a-face to me.

“Found it!”

Then he dropped through the ground out of sight.