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Quackity sprinted up marigold steps, orange petals softening each step. The bridge of flowers illuminated the dark night sky, shining upon the city of purple and blue below. A city so perfect looking, as if everything were built to purposefully blend together, that it hardly looked real. But maybe that was just the Mexican architecture taking effect. Quackity took a peek off the edge to get a better look as he continued running, followed by Luzu, Rubius, Sapo Peta and the others.
“What is this? The land of the dead?” Quackity asked.
“Like Coco!” Rubius pointed out.
“Yeah, yeah. That place from that one movie and not the Mexican holiday,” Quackity said sarcastically. “Hey, if this is the land of the dead, where’s my son?”
“Are we dead?” Luzu asked.
“In the land of the dead, many loved ones can be found,” Sapo Peta said in his usual stoic timbre, answering neither question.
Quackity took a handful of petals in his grasp, their glow making his skin warm. They told him what he was looking for was here. He just had to look. He thought of his sons. Tenta Culos and Merlon Vegetta. If he could find them he could bring them back. Such reassurance gave him hope, after all he’d lost.
Then Quackity fell off the bridge.
He crashed to the streets of the city with a thud, but felt nothing. Still, he rubbed his head and glanced up at the bridge now arching so high above him.
“What the fuck?!” he exclaimed. “Wait, how do I get back up there?”
The group looked off the edge at him, some unable to hide their amused smiles.
“Find your way through town to the beginning of the bridge,” Sapo Peta suggested.
Quackity weighed his options, then scoffed. “Fuck that, I’m gonna go find my son.” And left into the depths of the city. He could hear the guys behind him cheer him on, others telling him to wait, and the corners of his lips lifted into a half-smile.
Even this far from the bridge, night had no meaning other than to denote the time. Every house was sparkling inside and out. Beams from candles, lamps, and chandeliers burst out of windows onto the street. Streetlights as bright as the sun left no corner unexposed, and faintly in the air Quackity swore he heard music. Death was a party, and Quackity seemed the only one reveling in it. The actual dead of the city passed along slowly, as though they had nowhere better to be. They marinated in their stroll, heeding this living stranger running by them no mind.
“Son!” Quackity called out. “My son! Where are you?” He turned to examine every spirit he passed by, which was a pointless endeavor as he’d only passed human spirits and had yet to see anything resembling a duck or a turtle.
He continued to run around calling for his sons, bothering seemingly no one. Such an arduous search started to wear him out. The savory scent of al pastor wafted in his direction, and Quackity was made painfully aware of how hungry he was. How strange, the logic was. He felt no pain, but hungered. He looked once more at the residents surrounding him and wondered if it was the same for them. Perhaps that was the point of food offerings.
Quackity surrendered to his empty stomach and followed the smell to a quaint, concrete restaurant where through the window he could see a cook chop slices of pork off the spinner. The sight alone made his mouth water. The roll-up door was open, so Quackity waltzed in and stood at the counter, examining the menu from behind. From the inside, the smell of al pastor was evenly accompanied by smoke, and he turned for a moment to spot a singular customer with a cigarette in his mouth. He wore suspenders over a neatly ironed button-up shirt, circular rose tinted glasses, and a beanie similar to one Quackity himself had. He was playing cards against himself.
The cook cleared his throat and met Quackity at the counter. “What’ll it be?”
Quackity refocused on the menu. Something was off. “Excuse me, where are the prices?”
The cook laughed heartily. “Prices,” he muttered. “There are no prices. The price of death is more than enough.”
Quackity raised his eyebrows, impressed. The dead were communists.
“Alright. Two tacos al pastor and a can of coke.”
The cook nodded and returned to his work. Quackity shifted his weight as he waited.
“Hey,” the man at the table called to him. Quackity turned around, and the customer gestured to join him at the table. “Play a game of poker with me.”
Quackity knitted his brows, but wasn’t up for refusing the invitation. Something about the way he spoke demanded he ought to sit down, so he did. “I don’t think I’ve ever played poker before.”
“Tch,” he tutted. “Lost your ways, haven’t you?”
Quackity stared fixedly at the man across from him. He looked remarkably similar to Quackity himself. No, similar was an understatement. He was the spitting image. Figure, mannerisms, the way he spoke. His face… there was a scar trailing from his lips through his eye. It made Quackity grimace and without thinking he touched his own face in the same area.
The man across could sense the tension and smirked it off. “It’s more painful than it looks,” he said with a hint of humor in his voice.
Quackity lowered his hand. “Who are you?”
The man tilted his head, disappointed. “So you forgot how to gamble. Don’t tell me you’re stupid too.”
“You’re me.”
This won him an approving grin from his counterpart. “There we go. There’s hope for you after all.” He inhaled from his cigarette. “For clarity’s sake though you can call me Big Q.”
The cook came around with his plate of tacos and an open can of coke, carbon sizzling from inside. Though Quackity was far too intrigued with this conversation to take a bite. “But that doesn’t make any sense. I’m not dead.”
“Never said you were. Say, do you suppose that if there were a multiverse that we’d all go to the same hell, or different multiverse hells?”
“So you’re me from another universe?” Quackity leaned in.
Big Q shrugged. “I don’t know, man. Don’t look at me, I just got here.” He played with an ace of diamonds between his fingers. “As many people have died in my life, I still can’t make sense of this whole afterlife thing. Maybe it turns out the afterlife is whatever’s most convenient.”
Quackity was having a hard time understanding him. “But if you’re me then how come we’re in the same place?”
Big Q glanced towards the kitchen. “Same taste in tacos I guess. Not much of a surprise there. I've always had an insatiable appetite for pork.”
This conversation was giving Quackity the impression that he could ask all of the myriad of questions on his mind and still get nowhere hours later. As it turned out, his counterpart had questions of his own.
“Where are you from, Quackity?”
Unexpectedly, hearing his name from his own mouth irked him. “I’m from Karmaland.”
His counterpart proffered his hand. “Well, Quackity from Karmaland, it’s nice to meet you. I’m Quackity from Las Nevadas.” There was something bitter about how he introduced himself. How he referred to himself like that.
Quackity shook his hand. It was the exact same temperature as his.
“Karmaland,” the man across from him said, enunciating each consonant. “What are you missing from Karmaland?”
Quackity reeled his head back, confused by the question. “What makes you think I’m missing anything?”
Big Q stared down at Quackity’s plate. “Why do the dead hunger? Why do we cross the threshold of life and death just for a bit of bread? I mean, it sounds impractical, doesn’t it? We’re dead. We should be done with all the menial tasks the living have to do. Eating. Breathing. Pissing.” Big Q picked a piece of pork from Quackity’s plate and brought it to his lips. Doing so seemed like the first time he’d eaten anything in ages. He savored it.
“It’s because the soul never stops craving, even after death. We’re born with an innate need to become that seizes us with so much strength we spend our entire lives fighting to be someone. It’s a fact that follows us after death. I’ve known souls so hungry they never even left the land of the living after death. But none of them were ever as hungry as you or me.”
Quackity was silent for a moment, then laughed him off. “Come on. I just happened to be in the mood for tacos. There’s nothing to read into.”
“I don’t need to read into anything. I already know. We could never live anywhere and be satisfied. If you’re anything like me, which you certainly look the part, then there’s something your skin aches for. There’s something you need. So much, in fact, that you’re willing to kill for it.”
Quackity shifted his gaze awkwardly, ever so innocently. “I don’t know there’s anything I would kill for—”
But his counterpart, being him, saw right through his guise. “Oh drop the fucking facade. You know exactly what you’d kill for. Or do you just pretend you don’t? Is that the strategy? I can’t blame you, it’s a pretty good one. I’d know.”
Quackity did drop the facade, his expression forming into a glare that bore into eyes identical to his. “Yeah, it is. What did you do? Go around intimidating people into listening to you? If I’m going to become mayor then I need people to trust me, and the only way that’s going to happen is if they see me as a non-threat.”
Big Q leaned back in his chair, having gotten what he wanted. “Mayor.” He pursed his lips. He didn’t sound too pleased. “So it’s democracy, is it? Good old democracy. The voice of the people shining through the clouds.” He took a drag from his cigarette. “Fuck democracy. You should quit while you’re ahead.”
Quackity stared at the other him incredulously. “No. No, why the— why the hell would I do that? Everything I’ve done has led up to this election. I’m not just going to throw it away.”
His counterpart sighed. “You either throw it away or you throw away everything you love. Trust me. You’d never settle for less. My line of thinking is if you’re going to put so much of yourself into something, it ought to be yourself.”
Quackity shook his head. “That’s selfish. I’m trying to help the people of Karmaland.”
“Selfish is practical. At least you know who you’re serving. Hasn’t anyone ever told you not to trust anyone?”
Quackity’s eyes dropped, and his thoughts traced back the memory. “Something like that.”
Big Q studied his expression and raised one eyebrow. “Oh? But you trust him.”
Quackity’s gaze shot back up, and his counterpart sat there smiling triumphantly as if he’d just cracked it. “You aren’t innocent, but your expressions certainly are naive,” the other Quackity said, exhaling a puff of smoke.
Quackity rose from his seat, hands gripping onto the sides of the plastic Coca-Cola table. “What’s the point of you trying to get in my head? Is it fun for you? Because you’re dead and all cynical you think you hold something over me? I don’t have to listen to you. Just because things didn’t work out for you doesn’t mean I’m going to be the same way.”
The other raised his hands in surrender. “No, no, nothing like that. You can do whatever your heart desires, Quackity. I just can’t help but notice how we make the same mistakes. Even the ones that brought me here.”
Quackity paused. He hesitated asking his next question. “How did you die?”
The other Quackity glanced down. “I met someone. He was—” Big Q considered his words. “Well, I don’t know what he was. But I found him, defenseless, ignorant, bright eyed and so willing to learn. I felt it was my responsibility to help him. Teach him so that others couldn’t take advantage of him. And I said those exact words too. ‘Don’t trust anyone.’ I was a terrible teacher, because after a while I started to trust him. We were inseparable. My confidant in all my plans and ambitions.”
“What happened?”
The other Quackity grit his teeth. “He was taken from me. I thought they killed him. My other partners betrayed me and took him from me. The next time I saw him I thought they’d turned him against me. But I think in my final moments he really came to despise me. I bore my soul to him and he hated what he saw. So he killed me.” He looked up, pinning Quackity with a stare so direct it could’ve pierced through him. “That innocent ploy of yours works, y’know. Pity be on whoever falls for it.”
Quackity’s thoughts trailed back to Luzu and Rubius. How they doted on him and were always willing to help when he asked. How they played right into his hand.
There was a clatter of plastic and dishes, and Quackity thought something had been knocked over, but when he felt a force tug him by the collar forcing him to face his counterpart directly in the face, he realized the other Quackity had climbed over the table to grab him thus.
“Ambition, trust, all that bullshit. It killed me. Promise me,” he said with a heavy breath, “Promise me you won’t make the same mistake.”