A large crack has splintered across the upper left hand corner, but the glass remains intact. I roll my eyes towards Sam. “Nice work, Hulk.”
“Shut up,” he mutters as he finally manages to haul himself back to his feet.
Behind us the pounding on the front door has intensified to an earth shattering level. I know it must be my imagination, but it seems as if the wall itself is beginning to shake. Sam and I exchange equally nervous glances, which I take to be a very bad sign. I have a right to be scared – for multiple of reasons, the least being some unknown monster that is trying to break into the classroom – but Sam? He’s been dead for seven years. He should have the routine down and the fact that he is visibly terrified of whatever is trying to get in the room is not exactly reassuring.
“You throw like a girl. Out of my way,” I demand as I head for the front of the classroom, jumping over Sam’s mess of fallen chairs and tipped over desks as I go. The guy really is a klutz. It’s no wonder he died running into a tree.
“I throw like a girl? You are a girl!” Sam yells.
I ignore him.
The TV cart is heavier than I anticipated. Gritting my teeth, I manage to turn it sideways and find a clear path to the sliding door. The remote goes flying off the top of the VCR as I break into a run.
Sam dives to the side, his eyes wide in disbelief. I charge past him, pushing the cart in front of me like a battering ram. I think I yell something really cool, like ‘hiiiiiyyyaaaaaa!’ but I can’t hear my own voice over the roaring in my ears and the pounding at the door.
The cart crashes through the glass door and topples over the edge of the concrete slab outside, nearly taking me down with it. I catch myself just in time and, arms wind milling wildly, manage to stay on the slab. Sam appears in the open doorway, his mouth gaping open.
“Holy shit.”
“Holy shit,” I agree breathlessly.
“You just… The TV… and the glass… You just… Wow.”
I curl my fingers around my hips and rock back on my heels. “Let that be a lesson to you, oh wise guide. I may be a girl but I throw like a boy.”
Sam rolls his eyes. “Come on, we have to get out of here before–”
Dust, brick, and wood flies everywhere. The force of the explosion sends me flying back off the slab. I land hard on the ground and scramble to my feet as Sam jumps down next to me.
“—that happens,” he finishes.
“What was that?”
“No time to explain. Win, we have to run. NOW!” Sam grabs my wrist and pulls me after him.
Together we head for the woods.
CHAPTER NINE
Gasping, I pull up short inside a thick cluster of trees. To my left the earth drops sharply away to form a deep ravine. A shallow stream trickles along the bottom, the same stream we have been following for the past however many miles.
Equally exhausted Sam drops to his knees beside me and rolls to his back to lay spread eagled on a carpet of leaves. “Ugh,” he groans.
“I have a side stitch,” I complain, doubling over and holding my waist. “How can I be dead and have a side stitch?”
The hint of a smile flirts with one side of Sam’s mouth. “Your body is still the same as it was before you decided to go for a dip in the lake. Better, actually, seeing as you’re not all blue and frozen.”
“You’re hilarious.” I use sarcasm to hide the chill that races through me. I don’t want to think of what my body looked like after I died.
Drifting through the lake, my eyes open and unseeing. My skin slowly draining of all color. My limbs stiffening and locking into place. Will they even be able to find me with all the ice? Will I sink or float? Are there fish in the lake? Fish that will nip at my flesh and feast on my eyeballs? With a shudder I dispel that lovely image from my mind and try to concentrate on Sam who is still talking, oblivious to my temporary brain paralysis.
“…your scars disappear and your –”
“Start over,” I interrupt.
“What?”
“Start over. I can’t hear you. You’re mumbling.”
Propping himself up on one elbow, Sam shoots me a narrow eyed glare. “I wasn’t mumbling. You’re not paying attention. This stuff is very important and if you’re not going to pay attention then–”
“Save the lecture, okay Dad?”
“You’re kind of a jerk. You know that, right?”
“Just start over,” I say between my teeth.
Sam sighs, long and low, but because he is a nice guy and not a jerk like me, he complies. “Like I’ve said twice already, there are five levels in the After. I already told you that you’re a Level One. As a Level One you enter the After with the body you died in, minus any physical ailments or deformities. Did you have any scars?”
Automatically I look down at my left middle finger. Right above my knuckle there used to be a little wiggle line of raised skin from where my finger got pinched in a door when I was a kid. Now the skin is smooth, the finger perfect. “That’s crazy,” I breathe in disbelief. Bending down, I shove my finger in Sam’s face. “Look! There used to be a mark there.”
He bats my hand away. “Besides any scars going poof or any limps vanishing you stay pretty much the same. Your age. Your looks. Your hair. Tattoos. Any ugly piercings you may have given yourself.”
I manage to swallow my sharp retort and sit cross legged on the ground next to him. My hands burrow in the leaves to the fresh earth beneath. We’re deep in the woods now, further than I’ve ever been before. The soccer fields and the school are far behind us, as well as – hopefully – the mysterious thing that managed to break down an entire wall.
“If my body is the same then why can’t I feel pain?” I ask.
Sam reaches up to the bridge of his nose and adjusts his glasses. “You can feel pain, just not in the same way as you did before. It holds you back more than it hurts. Little things won’t matter anymore. Paper cuts. Splinters. Twisted ankles. You’ll still feed the big stuff, though. Broken bones. Knife wounds. You know.”
Broken Bones? Knife Wounds?! Sam says it so matter-of-factly I get the impression he’s talking from personal experience.
I never gave a lot of serious thought to what would happen when I died, but I did have a vague idea of singing angels and floating clouds and endless amounts of ice cream. Guides and pain and levels never much factored into the equation. It’s kind of a big let down.
“And my side cramp?” I ask. “What was that about? I mean, I still got tired from running, the same as I would have before. You got tired too.” I definitely did not miss the way Sam huffed and puffed his way through the last few minutes of our desperate sprint through the woods.
“The limitations of our bodies are still the same as they were before.” Sam folds his arms under his head and stares up through the trees. “We have to sleep when we get tired. Eat when we’re hungry. Drink when we’re thirsty. Go to the bathroom when… well, you know.”
I play with the dirt, scooping it up in my hands and letting it run through my fingers. “Then what’s the point?” I ask finally when my mind has had time to wrap itself around the idea of everything being the same in death as it was in life. No harps. No singing angels. No fountains of soda. No nothing.
“The point?”
“The point of being dead. If everything is the same as when you were alive, then why come back at all? Why not just rot away in some hole in the ground?”
Sam tips his head to the side to look at me with an expression that can only be described as condescending. “Your body will rot in some hole in the ground, but not your soul. Your soul is here and now. It is everlasting. Souls cannot be made, or destroyed. When your physical body can no longer host them, you wind up in the After, the only place where you soul can exist outside of your physical body.”
“That doesn’t even make any sense. If souls can’t be made, then how was I even born?” I took an elective on theory once my sophomore year of high school. It w
as a lot like this. Souls and death and creation and what happens after you die and what not. It sounded like a bunch of crap then and it sounds just the same now. After all, how can any one living know what happens when you die? The simple answer is they can’t. It’s impossible. So why try to theorize? Why speculate?
“Winnifred, Winnifred, Winnifred,” says Sam, clucking his tongue. “What came first, the chicken or the egg?”
“Huh?”
“What came first, the chicken or the egg?” he repeats. “The chicken is born from the egg, but to get the egg you have to have the chicken.”
I am certain I have heard this riddle before. “That’s easy, the chicken was… well, first you had to have the egg and…” I falter. Try again. Give up. “Whatever. Tell me more about the levels and what they mean.”
Sam must sense I am getting more annoyed by the second because he doesn’t laugh or make fun of me. Smart boy. “Like I said, there are five levels in the After. Each level you go up frees your soul a little bit more from the restraints your physical body imposed on it.”
“But you said my physical body is rotting away in some hole,” I say, exasperated.
“First of all, you’re the one who brought up rotting bodies in holes, not me. Second of all, your soul doesn’t know it is free. At least not yet. Have you ever heard those stories of wild animals kept in captivity? Lions and birds and stuff like that, brought in when they’re injured or orphaned. Ever wonder why they can’t be released back into the wild?”
I shrug and wonder what point he is trying to make now. “Not really.”
“It’s because even when you open their cage and give them their freedom, they’ve been held in captivity for so long they don’t recognize it. Your soul is like that. It has been held inside your physical body for so long it has forgotten what freedom is like.”
“I was only alive for sixteen years,” I point out. “That doesn’t seem like very long.” No, it doesn’t seem like very long at all.
“For a soul a second in a mortal body is an eternity,” Sam says gravely.
“And when you go to another level? What happens then?”
The longing in his voice is tangible as he says, “Every level you go up your physical limitations are stripped away. You don’t get tired. You don’t have to sleep. You have super strength. Super speed. Everything that once held you back slowly ceases to exist. I’ve only ever met one person above Level Two before. She was a Level Three and she was pretty amazing.”
I recognize the little twinge of jealousy for what it is and ignore it. “So how do I get there?” I ask.
“Get where?”
For someone who sounds so smart, Sam can be awfully stupid. “To Level Three. Duh. If I’m going to be dead I might as well be able to do cool things like leap fifty story buildings in a single bound.”
His eyes roll. “You don’t just get to another level. You have to earn your way there.”
“Like pass a test or something?”
“Or something,” he says vaguely.
Closing my hand around a fistful of dirt, I throw it at his chest. “Come on, tell me. You’re my guide. You have to.”
Sam sweeps the dirt off his shirt and sits up. “I don’t have to do anything. And I can’t tell you because I don’t know, okay? No one does. Usually it’s some kind of sacrifice, but not always. Sometimes it just happens. I moved up to Level Two when I became your guide.”
“What do you get to do when you’re a Level Two?”
“Help ungrateful brats,” he says without skipping a beat.
The alive Winnie would have been annoyed with Sam’s comment, but the dead Winnie finds it amusing. I like it when he sticks up for himself, even if it is at my expense. No one else did. Not my friends at school, not my dad, not even Brian. No one wanted to insult the girl whose mom had just died. So they felt sorry for me instead, and made excuses for when I was rude and acted out until that was the only way I acted and instead of making excuses everyone just started to leave me alone.
Slowly I recline backwards until I am lying on the ground. The leaves smell fresh and earthy. They cling to my hair and curl up over my hands. I look up, past the trees to the blue sky beyond. The thought that has been chasing me since I watched the television play back my life and untimely death tickles at the corner of my mind, annoyingly persistent.
It is not so much a thought as a question; one I am terrified to ask. Nerves do a tap dance in my belly. I try to think about something else, anything else, but I can’t. I can’t think about anything but the question.
“Sam?” My voice comes out whisper soft, but he still hears me.
“Yeah?”
“Can I… I mean, I don’t know how all this works but do you think… that is… Can I see my mother?”
Silence. I lay perfectly still, not even breathing. For the first time I notice there are no birds in the trees or flying through the air. It is strange being in a forest without birds. And quiet. It’s too quiet.
“You can see her,” Sam says after a long pause.
Air rushes out of my nose like someone popped a balloon. I turn my face blindly into the leaves. Burrow into their scratchy softness until I am nearly covered.
I hear Sam get up and start to walk around. He comes towards me, hesitates, and goes the other way. I am grateful he is giving me this moment. This moment to mourn the life of a sixteen year old girl who never really got to live. Who was selfish and rude and took things for granted. Who was sad and broken and hurt all the time, even though no one noticed.
Tears burn the back of my eyelids, then run down my face, across my nose, between my lips. I don’t make a sound. I learned how to cry silently after Mom died. Night after night I would sob into my pillow without a whimper while my father’s wails echoed through the house.
Now, for the first time, I cry for myself. For the life I will never have. For the college I will never go to. For the man I will never meet. For the children I will never raise.
I am dead.
CHAPTER TEN
If Sam notices my puffy eyes when we start walking again he doesn’t say anything. I am starting to like him more and more, and I am glad he is my guide, even if he sucks at explaining things. I still have so many questions.
Why did the door in the hallway take us to my old classroom?
What knocked down the wall?
Who was the man in the lobby?
Am I a ghost?
Can living people see me?
Where are the other dead people like us?
When can I see my mom?
Where are we going?
I settle on asking the last question first. With ever step we’ve taken since we stopped by the ravine Sam has grown more and more agitated. He keeps looking over his shoulder, all secret like as if he thinks I don’t notice, but of course I do. I look behind us too, but I never see anything. Just trees and more trees. There are still no birds or any other sign of wildlife, which is beyond strange. Great. Something else for me to ask.
“So, uh, do you have a destination in mind or what?”
“Yes,” Sam says tersely without looking at me.
I climb over a fallen tree. The edge of my sweatshirt catches and I have to stop to untangle it. It’s so warm I don’t really need to wear it, but I also don’t want to leave it behind, so I compromise by wrapping it around my waist. By the time I’m finished Sam is nearly out of sight. “Hey, wait up!” I call, forced to break into a run to catch up with him.
He still doesn’t look at me, not even when I pull alongside him. He just keeps walking, faster than he was before, so that I have to jog or risk being left behind again.
“What is your deal?” I complain, wheezing the words out between gasps of air. I am so out of shape.
“We need to get out of the woods.” He glances behind him for the thousandth time and my patience reaches its breaking point.
“That’s it!” I slam on the brakes.
“Come on,” Sam hisses, ma
king a grab for my arm. I snatch it out of reach.
“No. Not until you tell me what we’re running from. We are dead, aren’t we?”
He gives a short, annoyed dip of his head.
“Then why do you look like you’re about to piss your pants?”
His eyebrows slash down. “I do not look like I’m about to piss my pants.”
“You do. Just a little.”
I have never seen Sam so nervous before. He rakes his hand through his hair, pulling at the short tips. “Someone is following us.” He peeks sideways at me as he adds, “I think.”
“You mean someone like us?” I ask, intrigued by the idea of meeting another dead person.
“No, no, no, not like us.” Again he pulls his hair, this time so hard he gives himself a natural facelift. He looks so sincere in his terror that I am beginning to feel a little apprehensive myself.
“Who then?” I ask.
“One of the… Unknown,” he whispers. His eyes dart left and right, as if he’s expecting something to reach out and grab him. Rather unimpressed, I slouch back against a tree and use the bark to give myself a good scratch.
“Sounds like the name of a bad rock group.”
“They aren’t a joke!” he says fiercely.
“Whoa.” I stop scratching. “No need to get all crazy. You know, for someone who is dead you’re pretty serious all the time. I mean, you did face plant off the side of a mountain. What’s the worse that could happen to you now?”
Instead of answering, Sam looks over my shoulder yet again. Rolling my eyes I turn around, prepared to point out for the umpteenth time that there is nothing behind us… except this time there is.
It reels drunkenly between the trees, dragging its left leg behind it at an angle that makes my stomach turn. Blood, dark and wet, runs down its face, or at least what remains of its face. I can make out two squinty eyes and what I think is a mouth. The rest has been bashed in beyond recognition. A shirt hangs off its broad chest in tatters and jeans cling to its crippled legs, the only evidence that this thing – man? monster? something in between? – was once human. It swings its tree trunk sized arms from side to side as it walks, slapping its own chest with a sickening thud thud thud.
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