Clint expected to wake up to death. But not quite like this.

He remembered everything. It played over and over in that infinite darkness that overtook him: the car, burning; Rachel, screaming; the hot waves of his own blood pouring down his neck.

But she had lived. He had gotten her out of that car, used both his hands to squeeze the sputtering wound of her thigh shut until he he heard the wail of ambulances.

And then Clint collapsed. He remembered realizing, as he stared at the wet pavement, he would never get up again.

But when Clint opened his eyes, he saw his own bedroom ceiling. He reached up, and the gash on the side of his head was gone. He was still wearing his old Arctic Monkeys hoodie, which had been soaked in his and Rachel's blood.

"What the hell," Clint muttered. He sat up, stared across his room. And shrieked.

A man in a crisp black suit sat at Clint's desk. He held a phone that seemed to be all glass, yet it gleamed brightly in the man's hands.

"Oh," he said. "You're awake."

Clint stared around in confusion and mounting horror. "Why are you in my house?" he managed. Easiest of the questions he could ask.

"Better question is why are you in your house?"

"Uh. I live here?"

"I can't believe you forgot what happened yesterday." The man finally pocketed his phone. "Sorry. Work never rests."

Clint clutched at his hoodie. The blood that should have been there. "What's happening?"

"You may call me Death." The man spread his thin boney fingers. "You may have heard of me. We met, yesterday. I'm the one who picked you up off the road."

"Then how am I alive?"

"Oh, you're not." Death smoothed the lapels of his suit and stood to look out the window. "This is a new sort of in between I've devised." He smiled over his shoulder at Clint. "I've been trying these things called video games, you see."

Clint couldn't help his laugh. All this was too absurd, too insane. "Can you please get out of my house before I call the police?"

Death turned to him and scowled. "This is not your home, Clint Whitaker. This is one of the unused levels of hell. And you are part of my new experiment."

Shock and disbelief warred in Clint's mind. He shook his head and insisted, "That's insane. That's not possible."

"You remember dying yesterday, don't you?"

Clint nodded.

"Surely resurrection is more unlikely than death."

"This isn't what I imagined death would look like."

"Oh, no one ever imagines death quite right." The man walked to Clint's bedside and smirked down at him. "But you and I are going to play a little game. We're going to see if you can get to the castle and rescue the princess."

He offered his phone to Clint.

Clint reached out a shuddering hand and took it. On the screen, he saw a hospital room. And unmistakably in the bed lay Rachel in a sea of tubes and wires.

"You kept her alive when you died, true." Death's smile was wicked and delighted. "But you haven't saved her from me yet."

"Are you fucking crazy? You'd kill her just as part of some stupid game?"

"Yes. I'd also save her as part of some stupid game." Death walked to the door. "It's your choice, of course. But if you do nothing, know she will die."

"But what am I supposed to do?"

"Escape hell. Find where I've hidden her." Death grinned. "Think of yourself like a modern Orpheus in reverse. If you don't keep looking for your girl, she's gone for good. And so are you."

Clint scrambled out of bed and yelled at him, "Why the fuck are you doing this to us?"

Death smiled again. "It's quite simple. You're interesting, and I'm bored."

And then he walked out of the room, shutting the door behind him.

When Clint tried to follow, Death was already gone.

Clint stormed around his house, looking for tips or tools or anything he could turn into something useful, usable. He knew video games. After he graduated college and began working and seeing Rachel, he no longer had the time for it. But the logic was still there.

Anything could be helpful. Clues could be anywhere.

Clint scoured his apartment, throwing open drawers and cabinets and every closet he had. Though this apartment matched his real one in appearances, nearly everything was empty. His clothes were gone, his refrigerator barren. All the random little bits and baubles in the kitchen junk drawer had vanished. All Rachel’s extra hair ties and bobby pins that she kept in his bathroom drawer were gone too, and he missed them more than he thought possible.

In the bathroom, Clint caught his reflection in the mirror. He looked nearly like himself—dark-haired, eternally scruffy, confused as all hell—except there was a huge scar lacing his temple like a map of a river. He ran his fingers over the raised edge in disbelief. The scar tissue was shiny, smooth, undeniably there.

He piled up his scant inventory on the kitchen counter, everything he had managed to scrounge up from its various hiding places:

A backpack. A roll of duct tape. Another change of clothes. His jacket. Two steak knives. A compass. A couple bottles of painkillers. Bandages. A huge map with only a single circle occupying its entirety, marked on the rim with the words LEVEL ONE. Inside that first level, only Clint’s house was labeled, a little red dot with a house symbol beside it. And last of all, pinned to the front door, was the List of Rules.

Clint kept reading it over and over again. Hoping it would become a little less real. But every word looked like it was written in fire, the letters sharp-edged as a knife and tinged with ash:

Welcome to the first-ever Hell Game! You are one of a hundred lucky people to make it to the beta testing.

There are only three rules in the Hell Game:

1) If you die, you lose.

2) If you reach the end of the ninth level, you live.

3) You may kill each other, if you like.

Clint devised a duct tape sheath for his biggest steak knife. It was a flimsy thing and looked stupid hanging off his belt, but it would keep his knife at the ready. When he stood the knife clattered against his thigh, and he thought of the way that blood had just flooded out of Rachel. He thought of the way she had gripped his wrists and cried that she didn’t want to die.

You won’t, he told her. You won’t you won’t you won’t.

He told himself again, “You won’t die.” Half to himself. Half to Rachel, if she could hear him at all.

Clint stuffed his backpack full. He placed the map in his hoodie pocket and slung on his backpack.

Then, he had no choice but to open the door.

It looked exactly like Earth. The air was bright and clear and carried the faraway laughter of children. But his apartment was no longer in a grimy complex on the bad side of town. It was a pleasant yellow house in a rainbow row of cottages, each one shut up tight. Clint stood on his porch for a long few seconds, staring out at the verdant lawns, the infinite blue sky.

He began walking down the street. These houses looked empty and same-ish, as if someone had copy-and-pasted the same house over and over again with slightly different coloring.

Clint pulled his map out of his pocket. As he walked, the outer ring of the first layer began to fill itself in. Little bricks of houses, some of them with question marks hovering over them. He paused, staring. It made sense, of course, if he remembered this was not reality, no matter how much it looked like it could be. The map updated itself as he explored. Offered him hints of where to go next.

He pivoted back to the house he had just passed. It was robin’s egg blue, and a cherry pie sat on the open window sill.

Clint crept up the porch, the stairs groaning beneath him. He put a hand on the knob.

A shot rang out from beside him, so loud that Clint didn’t even hear his own yell of surprise. The porch rail behind him was splintered and gored and Clint tried not to imagine that as his head.

“Put your hands up,” he heard around the ringing in his ears.

Clint put his hands up and looked out the corner of his eye at the open window. There, hidden behind the pie, was the dark muzzle of a shotgun. A woman held it, and her glare pierced him like a bullet itself.

His heart began pounding, maddened. He remembered the rules.

Death was possible here. Real death. And he was staring it down the barrel.

The woman’s finger flexed over the trigger.