Far too fast for a pounding June rain.
She had slid into one corner, managed to get straightened out, and then didn’t make the next corner. The last thing she remembered was the Miata heading over the bank and for a large pine tree.
She must have bumped her head. She didn’t remember climbing up here to the road.
She quickly felt her forehead, looking for any sign of blood in the rain pounding at her.
Nothing.
The Miata’s lights were still on and she went to the edge of the road to look down at it. It was pretty smashed up, but it wasn’t that far off the road and the next person to come by would certainly see it and her.
She felt really sad she had totaled her Miata. She had bought it right out of college as well and it was the only fun thing left in her life after two years. Now it looked like she would be starting over completely.
The rain kept pounding at her and she could feel she was starting to really get chilled. It had been a seventy-degree day today. How could she be this cold?
A blue pickup, brand new from the looks of it, came around the corner, saw the lights from her car and quickly braked and pulled over onto the gravel shoulder of the road, putting on its flashing red warning lights.
The driver was a guy about forty. Maybe older. She could never tell with men in that range.
He pulled on a rain jacket with a hood as he climbed out and went to the edge of the road to look at her poor car.
She put one arm across her chest to cover what was showing through her wet dress and said to the guy, “I sure made a mess of it, didn’t I?”
He said nothing, but instead quickly scrambled down the bank. When he got to the Miata, he looked inside, then shook his head and at a fast climb came back up the bank and started toward his truck.
“Why are you ignoring me?” Eve asked.
She reached for the guy as he went past and her hand went right through his arm.
And as it did, she could feel and read his mind.
All he was thinking was to get help out here quickly. And that he doubted the woman in the car was alive. Her neck was badly twisted in a way that necks didn’t twist.
She watched him move to the truck and climb in and use his cell phone to call for help.
Then in the pounding rain, she moved over to the edge of the bank and once again looked at her car.
She could see now that she was still inside.
She was dead.
And she was just about as cold and wet as she could ever remember being. And she was getting hungry.
She was dead.
She was a ghost.
How the hell could she be hungry?
TWO
DEPUTY MCCALL CASCADE flat hated this part of his job. For two years now he had been working as a deputy sheriff. Except for the paperwork, he liked the job.
And he was good at it, actually.
But going to fatality crash sites was not anything he liked to do. Why would he? There was no one left to help.
He eased his patrol car over to the side of the road, but about four car lengths from the actual crash site since an ambulance was already taking up a part of that area. He turned on his lights to warn drivers coming down the winding hill.
He had also set flares back up the road. This road didn’t have that much traffic, but in this pouring rain, he could see why someone would go off the road if not paying attention or driving too fast for the wet, slick pavement.
He pulled up the hood on his rain slicker against the hard, pouring and damned cold rain and climbed out, leaving his car running to stay warm and for all the computer equipment to keep running. Joining the force two years ago, he had been surprised at the amount of computer work they had to do.
He moved down to where the two ambulance attendants in yellow rain slickers were already going down to the wreck. He went over the edge to join them.
It was an instant verdict by both attendants. The young woman driving the blue Miata had died instantly on impact.
Cascade decided he didn’t need to look. He didn’t need the image in his mind. He had become a cop to help people, not stare at dead bodies.
He had the attendants get her purse and put it in a plastic bag. Then he headed back up the embankment to where the man who had reported the accident stood.
“She’s dead, isn’t she?” the man asked.
Cascade nodded.
“Damn,” the guy said, shaking his head.
Cascade agreed with that completely. Thankfully she had been the only one in the car.
Cascade took the guy’s name and address and thanked him for calling in the crash. Then he let the guy go, noting his license plate on his blue truck as the guy drove away.
Then Cascade turned to head back to his car and to find out the identity of the poor young woman in the mangled car below. It was going to take a while for all the angles of the accident to be photographed and her body removed from the car. Thankfully, none of that was his job.
He got back into his warm patrol car and dug out the woman’s purse from the plastic bag, then her wallet inside the purse, and then her driver’s license.
He sort of jerked as he saw her picture. She had been very attractive, with long brown hair, brown eyes, and a really nice smile that made her eyes seem to almost sparkle.
And she was his age.
“Too damn young,” he said out loud, feeling a wave of sadness wash over him.
In the back of his mind he thought he heard a woman’s voice say “Thanks.”
He glanced around and then shook his head and pushed down his hood on his slicker and logged the information into his computer. This was just a tragedy, a horrible tragedy that there was no way he could have prevented.
A moment later he heard a woman’s voice say in the distance, “Holy shit, someone who actually cares.”
He again glanced around, but there was no one, of course. Maybe this was another of his superpowers that he didn’t know much about.
He had agreed to become a superhero in the law enforcement division of the world. It seemed that everything that existed had a god around it and there were lots of superheroes around in most areas to try to help people.
He had no idea at all what becoming a superhero meant, other than she said he would no longer age and his natural talents would become more pronounced as time went on and he got control of his powers.
He had no idea he had powers. But he had to admit, he saw things other cops didn’t notice and he could almost read a person’s emotions.
Reanna, his boss in the law enforcement side of superheroes, had told him he had lots of time to learn.
He just wasn’t sure what he was supposed to be learning.
And sitting in front of a tragedy where a young person died far too early in life sure wasn’t teaching him anything. That he was sure about.
He shook his head and started to get out of the patrol car when he heard the voice again.
“Mr. Perfect.”
He ignored it and closed the door and went back to help with getting the young woman’s body out of the car.
He didn’t feel like Mr. Perfect.
In fact, far, far from it at the moment.
THREE
AFTER STARING AT her car for a moment in the pouring rain, Eve had managed to find a tree on the inside of the road to give herself some shelter from the rain. But by the time the first cop arrived, she had been shivering so bad, she doubted she could even walk.
Was it possible to die twice, once from a car crash, another from freezing to death?
One of the county sheriffs left his car running when he climbed out in his rain slicker. So she had gone over to his car and tried to open the backseat car door, but her hand went right through it.
“Shit!” she had shouted into the rain. “Just shit.”
She needed to do something, so she closed her eyes and just pretended she was going to climb into the back seat. She wouldn’t have been surprised if she had end
ed up sitting on the concrete, but she actually ended up in the back seat of the car.
Success.
She could go through a door, but not fall through a seat. Who knew?
And thankfully, the sheriff had the heater running on defrost to keep the windows clear, so it was warm in the car.
He had a towel beside his seat and she had grabbed it, coming away with what felt like a towel in her hands, but the original towel remained in position. The one in her hand looked identical.
She hadn’t cared. Ghost towel or not, it was a towel.
Since she was a ghost, she had figured no one could see her, so she had stripped off her soaked dress and underwear and used the towel to dry off. Then she had finally used the towel to wrap up her wet hair on the top of her head.
She twisted the water out of her underwear and slid them under her butt to protect herself a little from the cold seat.
Then she twisted as much water out of her dress that she could and draped it over the front passenger seat to dry.
She was finally starting to warm up. She was naked and sitting in the back of a cop car. Under any other circumstances than being dead, this might have caused nightmares.
It still might.
The evening was just getting started.
Suddenly, the cop climbed back into his car. He was holding her purse in a plastic bag and as she watched, he pulled out her purse, then her wallet, then her driver’s license and shook his head.
“Too damn young.”
“Thanks,” she said from the back seat.
He pushed his raincoat hood off the back of his head and she gasped. Sheriff man was about her age and a looker, with short brown hair, a square chin, and from what she saw in the rearview mirror, bright green eyes.
And she instantly noticed he wasn’t wearing a ring.
What the hell was wrong with her? She was dead and lusting after a cop?
She stared at him for a moment as he called in her personal information and then keyed into the keyboard even more information, running her driver’s license through a scanner.
She was impressed. One high-tech car.
Then he just sat waiting for even more information to come up on his computer screen.
She really wanted to know more about this guy. Dead or not, a girl could look, couldn’t she?
Maybe if she touched him, she could read his mind like she had done with the guy who found her wreck.
She reached forward and put her hand on his shoulder.
Only her hand went inside him and she instantly felt the sadness he was feeling at her death.
“Holy shit, someone who actually cares,” she said aloud.
He glanced around, making her pull back and cover herself.
Then he shook his head and went back to studying the information coming through her screen.
“Can I make someone hear me if I am touching them? How cool would that be?”
He didn’t turn around at that, so she reached forward and once again put her hand inside his shoulder.
This time she let herself try to find out who he was before saying anything.
His name was Deputy McCall Cascade. Everyone just called him Cascade.
She liked that name.
He was exactly her age at twenty-six, liked his job except for events like this. He liked helping people and he didn’t have a girlfriend.
But there was even more. He really worked as a superhero in the law enforcement area under a woman who was a low-level god in law enforcement by the name of Reanna. She reported to some gods above her, but he had never met any of them.
She had no idea what the superhero thinking was. Some sort of game or something. He was new at it, only being recruited by the gods of law enforcement two years before right after he had joined the force.
“Mr. Perfect,” she said aloud with her hand still in his shoulder.
She could tell he had heard that.
He shook his head, put up his raincoat hood and climbed back out into the rain as another sheriff’s car arrived followed by a second ambulance.
Wow, she was worth two ambulances. Thankfully she wouldn’t be paying the bill on this one.
She watched for the next thirty minutes as they got her body out of the car and up into the second ambulance.
The more she sat there, the more puzzled she got by all of this. She had no idea what was going on.
She had never believed in ghosts or an afterlife or anything. But clearly she was living, at least for the moment, some sort of afterlife.
And she was hungry and pretty soon would need to pee.
You would think a ghost wouldn’t have to deal with all the real world stuff. Rules of ghostieness were sure different from anything she had ever read or watched in the movies.
Twenty minutes later, Cascade climbed back into the patrol car and again lowered the hood on his raincoat.
Her breath caught, if she had been breathing, which she was pretty certain she had been. He had gotten even more handsome, if that was possible.
He moved her purse in its plastic bag from the console beside him to the passenger seat, then waited until the ambulance in front of him pulled away. He pulled out to follow it. It seemed he had gotten the duty of staying with her body.
If she had been alive, he could have done more to her body than just stay with it.
Then she laughed.
If he could actually see her in the back seat, sitting nude on her still damp panties, wouldn’t he be surprised?
Actually, come to think of it, she was the one sitting here that was surprised.
She had expected a great night with friends.
She hadn’t expected to die.
But she supposed no one expected to die.
She actually wasn’t that upset about it for some reason. But she really needed to pee.
FOUR
CASCADE DROVE BEHIND the ambulance as they worked their way down the dark, tree-lined canyon and to one of the main roads. Neither he nor the ambulance had emergency lights on since there was no reason to be in a hurry.
Eve Bryson was in the ambulance and there was no doubt she was dead.
He just couldn’t take his mind off the smiling picture of Eve on her driver’s license. He had a sense that if he had known her, he would have liked her. Of course, that wouldn’t have mattered since she was married and he never allowed himself to get near any married woman.
Actually, in the last few years, he had only dated a few times. He liked his solitude, mostly. And just hadn’t found anyone that really attracted him.
Or that he felt a connection with in any form.
Eve’s picture had attracted him, and he had felt an attraction to her. But maybe that was because she was safe.
She was dead.
And he had no idea where the voice was coming from he was hearing. That had never happened before. He was going to have to ask Reanna about that next time he talked with her. He wasn’t certain if hearing voices was a superpower or a sign he was going crazy.
He didn’t feel crazy. And the woman’s voice in his head sure sounded sane as well.
Anything was possible, he was starting to learn. As a regular Marine and then four years of college, he had had no idea about any of this superpower and superhero stuff. No regular person did.
And now that he was starting to learn about it, he sure didn’t talk about it to anyone. They would lock him away and toss the key into the brush.
That was another reason he hadn’t found anyone to really care about. Supposedly he was going to live a long time. How could he tell a partner that he was a superhero and got his instructions from the gods of law enforcement? Not the best grounds for any kind of relationship.
He pulled into an area off the back of the hospital behind the ambulance. Damn he hated this. But it needed to be done.
As the two ambulance attendants got out and went to unload Eve’s body, Cascade sighed.
He picked up her purse and his clipboard and
ignoring the woman’s voice in his head talking about regret, he got out to follow the body into the hospital.
He wanted to rescue people. Stop bad guys.
Not follow dead people around.
Parts of this job most certainly sucked.
FIVE
EVE HAD NO idea why the ambulance took her body to a hospital. She was clearly dead and they weren’t even bothering to run with lights.
So as they pulled into a hospital loading area, she touched Deputy Cascade again.
The answer she was looking for came easily. Because she died alone and under suspicious circumstances, they had to do an autopsy. And it seemed in this county, the hospital morgue was where that was done.
“You won’t find anything in my bloodstream except anger and a lot of regret.”
She could see in his mind that he heard her. He wasn’t certain what he was hearing, but he clearly heard what she had said.
He picked up her purse and she grabbed her dress. They were parked under a canopy so she wouldn’t get wet. She closed her eyes and pretended to open the door and step out of the back seat of the car.
The evening air had a chill to it and she was in front of a hospital, naked except for sandals on her feet and a towel wrapped on her head. Not this was the stuff of nightmares.
She quickly slipped her still-damp dress over her head. That sent shivers down her spine. But it was better than walking around a hospital completely naked.
Slightly better.
If there were other ghosts, she was going to make a great first impression. A dress you could see through and a towel on her head.
Cascade was striding toward the big double doors, following the gurney with her body on it.
She ran and caught up to him, going through the wide sliding-glass door beside him. Inside, the dim hallway smelled of antiseptic and roses, of all things.
The gurney with her body on it sort of clicked going down the smooth tile floor and she walked beside Cascade.
She just felt right walking beside him. Weird, but true.
Smith's Monthly #23 Page 13