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‘Then you keep moving round, I suppose?’ said Alice.

‘Exactly so,’ said the Hatter: ‘as the things get used up.’

‘But what happens when you come to the beginning again?’ Alice ventured to ask.

- Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland

13 Years Ago

Oz was murdered on a rainy Monday morning.

He had been visiting his aunt and uncle to discuss his new employment at a medical supply factory, and his cousin had taken that moment to finally snap.

It really shouldn’t have come to any great shock to anyone who knew the man.

He’d always been a sadist, and time had only made that tendency more pronounced.

As such, when he burst through the doors of the trailer, Oz wasn’t terribly surprised.

Hooch was one of those people who always seemed on the verge of killing everyone in the room.

People had said the same thing about Oz, so he was pretty good at recognizing it.

As it turned out, Hooch was upset with his parents over…

something. To be honest, Oz couldn’t really follow that part of it.

There was too much screaming, and Oz had deliberately avoided speaking to the rest of his family, for obvious reasons.

They hadn’t talked in months. Hooch was so emotional though, so the issue was undoubtedly something minor.

But as soon as Hooch burst through the door, Oz had known what he was there to do. It was written all over the man’s face. Whatever tiny bits of a soul had held the man back all those years had finally snapped, and Hooch was there for blood.

He had continued screaming at his parents, then turned to Oz, obviously expecting Oz to back him in this endeavor.

“They made our lives a living fucking hell, Oz,” Hooch had spat out, voice slurred with alcohol, “they deserve this!”

And that presented Oz with a very definite choice: he could do what was right or he could get his revenge.

There was no choice there.

Oz had stepped between Hooch and his aunt and uncle, trying to talk the man down and get the knife. Oz had no intention of killing anyone, no matter how awful they had made his childhood years or how much he might have hated them.

And that’s how Oz had gotten murdered.

Hooch stabbed Oz, then proceeded to kill everyone else in the trailer.

Oz’s body had been tossed into the dump, where it remained for two days. No one found it. His head had been stuffed inside a plastic bag, his hands and legs secured by duct tape. His corpse had been a terrible sight; covered in blood, flies, and filth.

To make matters worse, he wasn’t exactly dead.

Depending on how you chose to look at the situation, Oz was either lucky or unlucky, and his cousin had botched the job of finishing him off.

Which wasn’t terribly surprising, since Hooch had never been especially good at anything .

He had stabbed Oz several times in the chest, but missed the vital organs.

He did a similarly half-assed job with the plastic bag, and didn’t bother to make sure it was airtight.

The man had always been terribly sloppy when he was off his meds.

And when he was drunk. And when he hadn’t been getting enough sleep. And really anytime, really.

So, Oz hadn’t died.

He was a hard man to kill.

Unfortunately.

Oz had come to in the dump an unknown amount of time later, gasping for air.

The bag had been punctured by something in the pile of trash he was stuck in, and he frantically tried to get oxygen into his lungs.

Sadly, he managed only to inhale what felt and tasted like used coffee grounds.

He shook his head desperately trying to dislodge the bag.

He was finally able to tear the hole wider on something, and tried to return his breathing to normal.

That had been at least two days ago, judging by the number of times he’d seen pinpricks of light make their way into his cocoon of garbage. He continued trying to saw through the bindings on a shard of broken glass… or something which was sharp, anyway. He wasn’t sure.

He tried to ignore the body next to him.

His aunt’s cold dead eyes were inches from his and had been staring at him accusingly for the past two days.

Her cold, stinking, congealing blood continued to slowly drip from her neck wound onto his bare chest, as her body exsanguinated.

Apparently, his cousin had decided to dispose of her at the same time he had dumped Oz in this pit, and tossed her body on top of his.

His aunt had been lucky though, and the wound put her out of her misery immediately.

Oz, on the other hand, had the fun of dying slowly of thirst or hunger, buried alive.

Or if he was really lucky, being asphyxiated with mouthfuls of trash or his aunt’s blood.

Really, he would welcome either death though, as they both promised a break from the smell.

The stench of the dump and his aunt’s decaying body and Oz’s sweat and fear, all mixed together until it seemed to be a living thing.

Some moist, heavy, thing , sitting on top of Oz and filling his nose with a smell worse than any nightmare.

It was… it was the kind of reeking, putrid dreadfulness that had Oz simply trying to move his head enough to see the wounds to his own chest and guess how much longer it would be until he bled to death.

How much longer he’d have to endure this.

Oz had spent the first few hours doing nothing but screaming in shocked horror, trying to wake himself from the horrible nightmare he found himself in.

He’d spent the next day or so crying, begging any kind of god that would listen to take pity on him.

At some point this afternoon, his prayers had switched from begging to be saved to just begging to die. He’d rather be nothing than stay in this hole any longer. It was obvious he was going to die either way, so it might as well be sooner rather than later.

But now, he’d turned all of that off. He wasn’t praying or crying or screaming.

He simply stared through the tiny break in the garbage heaped on top of him, babbling nonsense to himself. He wasn’t even sure what he was saying, really.

As the sun was setting on his second day in his trash filled grave, he actually recognized where in the dump his cousin had disposed of him.

Above him, he could see the faint outline of the familiar coffee ad, the 1950s redhead serving her unseen lover coffee and looking at him like he was her perfect shining hero.

The billboard had been buried over the years, now entombed along with him.

But he recognized it in the shadows all the same.

Oz’s mind snapped back to reality, like flicking on a light switch.

He had wanted to be a hero.

He’d always wanted to prove to himself and the world that he didn’t belong in this dump. That he wasn’t trash.

But that’s what he was now.

Trash.

Literal trash.

Discarded like all of the other unwanted, dirty things which were piled up and forgotten out here in this toxic hellhole.

Oz was going to die here. And there wasn’t a single person in the world who would give a shit about that. There was no one to save him.

The redhead with the coffee seemed to find that idea funny, the decaying remnants of her perfect smile challenging him to do something about it.

His meaningless babbling gradually shifted to the opening bars of the William Tell Overture .

There was no fucking way he was going to die down here. He’d lived his entire life in this dump, and he’d be damned if he was going to die in it too.

Oz might not be a hero… He might be evil, deep down… But Oz still had power. He could still do things his cousin couldn’t and he wasn’t about to die without giving this his all, no matter how distasteful the idea was.

Oz was trash. It was in his blood now. It was a part of him and always would be.

But trash obeyed its own.

His hands formed fists in the cramped cavern, as he got angrier.

His aunt seemed to beg him not to do it, the roaches and worms crawling over her dead foggy eyes making it look like she was blinking at him in disbelief.

But Oz didn’t care.

He controlled germs and bacteria and microbes…

And his cousin had tried to bury him in a fucking dump!?!

Oz was going to make him pay dearly for that.

He was going to rip his way through the garbage and then go and show Hooch what nightmares really were!

Above him, the redhead on the billboard seemed to be silently daring him to do it, her perfect smile now sly and expectant. As if she were saying, “Okay… let’s see what you can really do, Oz?”

Oz’s vision blacked over, leaving the human scaled world and accessing his powers.

Nine hundred centillion creatures stood at attention, preparing themselves for Oz’s orders.

He let out a bellow of sheer rage, using the last of his energy reserves.

A millisecond later, the trash above him dissolved, decomposed, and rotted so fast that it was like it exploded, sending stray bits of paper and plastic shooting into the air.

His aunt’s body was illuminated in the fading light of day for a brief moment, then it too vanished, consumed by things so tiny and horrible that there weren’t even names for them.

The redhead on the billboard’s smile was now smug, apparently unsurprised. The ancient paper crinkled before being eaten away to nothing, that smile never wavering.

It was a testament to his “bad blood” that he felt worse about the loss of the billboard than he did about the loss of his aunt and uncle’s bodies. Or, for that matter, the people themselves.

Oz really was trash.

The plastic bindings on his wrist vanished too, the microbes tearing through them like they weren’t even there.

Oz was too far gone to even care though, rising on his unsteady legs and stalking from the hole.

He needed to get to a hospital.

And then he was going to go have fucking words with Hooch.

****

Four Years Ago