“Where are my shoes?” I asked again. If I got them and returned to the cruise ship, maybe the whole horrible experience would vanish. I was not afraid to pretend the whole thing never happened. No one needed to know, and I could get back to enjoying those cabana boys by the pool.
If my tone came off a little demanding, it served the guy right. Ok, maybe I should have considered being grateful since without him I'd be, well, dead but I needed shoes and needed them now. Denial was a beautiful thing.
“Let me get them for you. I put them... uh...” He cast about, a bit absentmindedly.
Oh, dear Lord, he lost my shoes.
These feet did not meet the great outdoors without something on them. I would never make it anywhere without protection for the soles of my feet. Did metabolically challenged folks need to worry about blood pressure?
“You said you only removed them for the ceremony. How far could they go without me in them?”
He blinked, maybe a little put off by my biting tone. Bully for him. Only an idiot would get between a girl and her shoes.
“I, uh, I took them off after bringing you here and... um... then...”
Oh geez.
He still refused to tell me exactly what he did? What on earth does it take to do some kind of Hocus-Pocus-Pretend-I'm-Merlin garbage anyway? I needed to take the fate of my toes in my own hand and find Jimmy myself.
“Hey, where did you put them? Maybe with your stuff? I assume you lit these candles with something? Or maybe...”
He snapped his fingers. Glad I could spark his brain to work by pointing out the glaringly obvious.
“Wait here. I'll be right back.”
He ducked out of the musty, ancient room, leaving just me, and the cobwebs, and the table I woke up on. In disgust I looked at the table but saw no real signs of thousands of brutal ritualistic sacrifices. I hoped that meant I got lucky. Maybe this was just where the priests would come to have supper after a long day of those brutal ritualistic sacrifices. Carving up humans and chucking them to the gods must have worked up quite the appetite!
What did I know? I sure didn't pay attention to any of that history junk growing up. I had a life, so I focused on my clothes, my nails, and if Bobby McKearny liked me. (He did, we dated for nine weeks my senior year before I dumped him for a college guy I met at a party.)
Brutal ritualistic sacrifices... yech. I shuddered. I couldn't get the thought out of my head. It wanted to run around inside my brain, making me worry I might lose my mind. Then again, I was believing some crazy guy raised me from the dead. Did that mean it was too late to worry about my mind?
I edged towards the only escape from the room: a shadowy door frame. The dark tunnel he disappeared down looked rather foreboding. Did I really want to blunder down it? Barefoot? I squinted down the hallway mostly out of some sort of reflex or habit but realized the effort was completely unnecessary. No candles as far as I could see. How could I make things out?
No worries about premature wrinkling from squinting here! Killer perk! The future plastic surgeon in my life would probably mourn the loss of his new Audi. Worked for me, if not for the doctor. The idea brought a small grin to my face, and I stopped squinting. Laugh lines were okay. Crow’s feet – not so much.
Did that mean I scored my glorious twenty-eight-year-old body forever? Okay, I claimed twenty-eight, even if I was really thirty-three. No one believed me when I said my real age anyway and I sometimes even got carded when ordering from the bar. No skin off my back if I got to stay young forever. If dying at thirty-three meant looking mid-twenties for eternity, how could one complain?
Really, at this point, downsides seemed scarce. Obviously, I was alive, so who could deny me use of my credit cards? Could they prove I was dead if I was walking around and talking to people? Corpses that walk and talk generally give off a non-corpse vibe to people, especially authorities dealing in death stuff. No way people could deny me my rights.
I wondered who to contact about discrimination towards the not-dead. This could be a whole new angle for civil rights lawyers.
What was I?
The question made me really think. I was dead, but not dead. No blood thirst and fangs, plus this guy totally did not seem vampy. That logic ruled out vampire.
The slim information he gave was this: I croaked, he performed some ceremony, and now here I stood. Un-croaked. I wasn’t really alive. Undead? Re-alive? If you think you're confused, just imagine how I felt.
I needed to figure it out before crying foul. Undead discrimination people might not consider me undead. There's nothing like being dissed by your own people.
I needed to find out what this guy said and determine my new station in life and death. Why did it sound so boring? I planned on smiling pretty in hopes that nerd-boy might sum things up. Don't judge, sometimes flirting could really get the ball rolling.
My mental focus returned to the hallway. It was nothing more than a long corridor.
Where the hell did he hide my shoes?
You carried the hot dead girl from the crumbling building into the creepy Aztec Temple of Doom. You put her on a grody old stone table after hopefully making sure there’s no gross, two thousand-year-old blood on it from barbaric sacrifices. You removed shoes and put them underneath said table. You used crazy ritual, which once more, had better not mean we’re married, to bring her back. You gave her back her shoes. End of story.
What part of this particular chain of events meant hiding my shoes in the next Mexican city over? Really, it wasn’t a hard concept. How long ago did he leave? My impatience only grew.
I returned to the mental list for each category to hang on my scales. I needed to find balance, an equality between the two. Only then could I truly get on with my life; death; whatever.
On the side of being alive I added the usual goodness: Birthdays, parties, shopping, guys, shopping, family, guys, work, shopping, and guys.
On the side of being whatever I heaped on: Young and hot forever, oh can I celebrate my birthday and my death day? Double the presents! It was awful close to my birthday, but still, little is perfect in this world.
That was as far as I got when my nerd in a lab coat returned. All praises to the shoe gods, his hands held my Jimmy Choos, albeit a little too carelessly. I raced to him, snatching my precious shoes for a tight embrace.
Ahhh, Jimmy Choo, how I missed you so!
A choice lay before me: sit on the dirty stone floor or perch myself on that nasty table. I Choos the road less traveled, attempting to balance myself on one foot while reintroducing Jimmy to my feet. Worked fantastic for the first shoe, not so much for the second. I tottered a bit while struggling to put on lefty but managed to maintain my balance.
My clothes didn’t remember the better days of no earthquakes, but the shoes looked great. Order in my world reigned once more, if a bit weakly. Now, to get back to my cabin for some outerwear as well as a mojito, and I might just survive this insanity. Oh yeah, except I needed some more information.
“Thanks for my shoes. Think you could give me the Reader's Digest version this time of what the hell is going on?”
“Well it started four years ago when...” he began. I frowned.
Well, that's not going to work. I held a hand up, stopping his Sunday stroll down Memory Lane.
“I said Reader's Digest. You do understand Digest, right? Just the important stuff.”
“It's all important. You need to know where it all began to understand what’s going on now.”
“No, see, that's where you’re wrong. I really don't. Just tell me what you did in this ceremony thing.”
“I reanimated you,” he said. “I used a Mayan ceremony to bring you back from death.”
He used the ceremony word again. I bet he thought I wouldn’t notice. I did.
“Yeah, see, I don’t get this ceremony thing. I know all about these creepy places out here in the back end of nowhere. All you do is accept an apple from someone and poof, you’re married. You
didn't marry us, did you? Cuz if so then let me tell you, I'll have it annulled so fast-”
“Married? No. What?” He looked taken aback. Apparently, he didn't watch the TV exposé's that featured all these crazy native cultures. I had the Travel Channel and I wasn’t afraid to watch it!
“You better be glad. It takes more than some kind of reanimated - whatever that means - deal to get me, Mister.”
Okay, it didn't take much more, but he did not need to know that. What can I say, I enjoyed a good time; even I had standards.
“Can I tell you more now so you can understand?” he sighed.
He wasn’t going to give up, was he?
“Keep it short. I just need to know about this reanimation thing. I have a boat to catch, you know.”
I was a little worried that I couldn't prove my identity sans purse. Another bone added to the scales. Balance appeared illusive for the time being. I bit back a growl in my throat. Where was the peace of normal life and would I find it again?
“A boat? Um, what do you mean?” He pushed the glasses up his nose again and then ran his hand through his hair. He still looked nervous.
“Do I seriously look like I am from around here? This was just a day trip for the cruise I am on.”
What kind of nerd is seriously this clueless?
“There might be a problem then. See, it's been uh... a day and a half since the earthquake.”
Well, that was definitely not news I wanted to hear. Not looking good for the reanimated side of things. If only I realized how much worse things would get. I might be hot and thirty-three forever, but it came at a price. No one liked having the dead walk amongst them. I thought life sucked having brown hair instead of blonde. I thought it was bad being a size 8 instead of a size 2. Forget whining about the race wars or the battle of the sexes.
Libras enjoyed balance. Their sign was the scales used by the modern judiciary system. I never understood what it felt like to be judged until I died and found myself resurrected by my very own geek guru. This was worse than being the pimply kid in eighth grade, worse than being a vegetarian in a steakhouse, worse than being a Republican in California!
I saw the other side of the prejudice coin with crystal clarity. People walked on the other side of the street from me. It was like Julia Roberts in the beginning of Pretty Woman with the shopkeepers that won't help her because of the way she was dressed. Mothers kept their children from me.
And then there were The Hunters. At some point I needed to figure out how to grow eyes in the back of my head so those bastards didn’t sneak up on me. I thought dying would be the end of my worrying about death, but no. There seemed to be those Shaun's of the world that wanted to fling their bad '45's in the lamest attempt to kill me. And then there were the serious ones, but we'll get to them later. Even after you die, you still needed to worry about taking a permanent dirt nap.
Good grief, can't a girl rest in peace?
c
chapter three
There we stood: me in my Jimmy Choo's and not-dead, and he in his dusty clothes and entirely very-alive. It didn't take a degree in rocket science to figure out I was in one heck of a mess.
“You said it's been how long since the earthquake?” I repeated.
Maybe I heard him wrong. Maybe he was exaggerating. Maybe there was still a chance. My brain tried desperately to convince itself that there was no way what he said could be happening to me. It sounded more like a movie plot than real life.
“A day and a half.”
Short, sweet, and to the point. Fine time for him to pick up that habit. I looked at him and sighed. No passport. No ID. Missing for more than a day after an earthquake. I was lucky enough that some weirdo decided to resurrect me from the dead, maybe my luck would hold out. Knock on... uh... stone. Yeah, stone.
Maybe, just maybe, I Lady Luck was still on my side. Loads of us passengers came over from the ship for the day trip. I couldn't be the only missing person, could I? No way.
“Hey, look, things are still pretty messed up after the earthquake. Maybe your ship didn't leave,” he offered. If it wasn't such an obvious problem, I might have thought he was a mind reader. All the same, it felt nice to hear my thoughts voiced by another person. Maybe my wish would come true.
“Yeah, but I also have no identification. That'll make it harder to get back on.”
I wistfully thought about that darling Coach purse lying under the rubble of the shop and nervously bit my lip. Hey, I mourn the loss of good accessories. What girl doesn’t?
“That might pose a problem. Uh, there's something else,” he said in a tone that made me want to twitch. Coach purse forgotten, I returned my gaze to the man before me. What other problem could there be when you had no Amex or ID, not to mention the whole dead thing? Morbid much?
“Why do I get the feeling...”
“You might not like this? Yeah.”
Oh great, he finished my thought. Talk about annoying.
“So, you see, the thing is...”
“Band-aid, dude. Rip it off - fast,” I demanded. Guess he’d lost that short and sweet from before.
“What? Oh, right?” There went the finger pushing the glasses up his nose again. Was it bad that I started to find that endearing? Yech. Ever heard that 'be careful what you wish for' thing? Yeah, he decided to rip that band-aid off and he was right: I did not like what he said next. “The ceremony. It, um. Well, I don't know exactly how or what it does. I don't know if there are any side effects or...”
Side effects? Geeks performing this ritual may cause upset stomach, gas, bloating, headache, dehydration... that sort of side effects?
Well, I felt fine and a quick glance showed no bloating or swelling. I narrowed my eyes and glared at him.
“What. Do. You. Mean?” Breathe. I needed to breathe. Or wait, maybe I didn't. I could figure that out later. Right now, I had other scores to settle. Back to glaring.
“Well, I don't know how long the effects last. There was very little information. In fact, there was no information.”
“Are you saying I might die? Again?”
No way. I was far too young (and hot) to die twice. Not an option. Moving on?
“I don't think so. I don't know. I don't know what it means for you. Like what can hurt you or what happens to any injuries or-”
“Well if I died from a roof caving in on me and I seem okay to walk what does that say?” I barked.
Oh, maybe I was like the vamps in movies!
No one beat the ability to survive accidents with hardly a scratch. Okay, the downside was a fascination with blood. Was that really such a bad price to pay for immortality and near invincibility? Then again, I didn't really like the idea of an all liquid diet. Well, liquid was fine, just not that liquid. I shuddered thinking that my next drink might literally be a Bloody Mary. Ewwwwwwww!
“True. But we have no real way of knowing what could happen. We should probably make sure you are um... really okay.”
“And by really okay you mean...” I left the sentence unfinished on purpose. He looked thoughtful but remained silent. I cleared my throat. This was like pulling teeth. “You mean, what?”
“Well, you probably want to see how much you can do. How much energy you have? What your limits are.”
“Look, I'm real thankful that you didn't leave me... dead. You know? I don't want to be your own personal lab rat.”
Did he seriously think I'd be all like ready to hop into his maze and... well... whatever? Oh, thanks for saving me, let's go party? Not! Well, maybe. Depends on how happening the party is.
I noticed him shifting his weight from foot to foot. “Um, I'm sorry. It isn't like that. I mean...”
Now cut me some slack. I knew I needed to be nicer to my savior. Especially given the fact I also needed his help to get anywhere. Like back to civilization.
“Hey, this is a bit much to take in. We need to figure it out so we can get on with our lives, but that doesn't make it easy to accept.” Yea
h, I decided to settle down.
I guess he noticed because he nodded and swallowed. “Um, I'm sorry. I probably should have been better prepared. I just didn't think...”
Okay, I could buy that. Who really planed that in the event of an earthquake they'd just happen to resurrect some dead girl? Oh, that sort of thing happened every day, right? In real life? That's what I thought.
“What do we do now? Cuz it seems to me like things aren't cool right now. I'm trapped here with no passport, no ID, no Amex. I'm dead and you're clueless about what that means.” I paused and licked my lips before muttering, “Some vacation this turned out to be.”
My sarcasm was not lost on him. He raked his hand through his hair for about the millionth time and blinked. “We'll figure it out. We just need to-”
“We need to what?” I snarled. My temper wavered again. I'll admit it, patience was most definitely not my strong suit.
“First, we need to get out of here. Then we need to run some simple tests and we can probably find most of our answers out and go from there.”
I totally got on board the get out of the creepy temple bandwagon about two seconds after I woke up. Not my idea of an ideal hang out spot. Dust, dirt, spiders, hundreds of years of creepy history. Looking back on it now, I shuddered thinking about that place. One word: creepy. Just in case you didn't get the picture before.
“Super. Let's jet.” I looked around but had nothing to retrieve since all he grabbed out of the collapsing shop was the most important thing - me. “Hope you got some ideas because my knowledge is here, the bus ride to the harbor, and the ship.”
“That's fine. I know a place.” He turned toward the doorway leading to the long hallway and took a few steps towards it, but I stopped him.
“Hey, what about all the candles?” Guess this dude wasn't a Boy Scout. Abandoning lit candles? Sure, nothing here seemed likely to go up in flames, but still. People might notice something freaky deaky happened when affronted with burnt candles. Then again, maybe no one ever came in here. I know I could have gone on living without seeing the place. Or I guess I could have gone on in my death?
Juan of the Dead Page 2