For Mom, one of each.

For Michele. (Insert clever in-joke here.)

For the DFW Writer’s Workshop, where I learnt me to be a gooder writer.

For me, because I was stupid or stubborn enough to get here.

And for Jim Varney.

HIS NAME WAS Never Dead Ned, but it was only a nickname. He could die. He’d met his death forty-nine times, and forty-nine times he’d risen from the grave. Although, after his reputation spread, people stopped bothering to bury him. They’d just throw his corpse in a comer and wait for him to rise again. And he always did. But every death took a little bit away from him, put another ache in his joints, sapped a little more spring from his step. And Ned learned the hard way that there were worse things than dying.

There was dying over and over again.

Ned didn’t have much interest in living, but he did his damnedest to avoid perishing again. Not until he could do it right. Not until he knew with absolute certainty that he would stay dead. For a soldier, fearing death was usually a career ender, but Ned found a position in the bookkeeping department of Brute’s Legion. It wasn’t much. Just counting coins. It didn’t pay well, but it was relatively safe. As safe as it ever was when your supervisor had a strict policy of devouring anyone whose books were out of balance more than three times a month.

War was the Legion’s business, and business had been good until four hundred years earlier, when the various species of the world had finally managed to put aside their differences. The Legion’s accountants had predicted a swift and irreversible downward spiral in profits. And sure enough, the following three decades had been rough.