Dead Rules

by Randy Russell

  Jana walked to the table holding the dividing door open. Candles were burning there. They’d been arranged on a paper plate.

  “It’s a birthday party,” a girl with a cigarette in her mouth said to Jana. “We ran out of cake.” The Slider’s eyes were dark red where they should have been white. They must have filled with blood as she was dying.

  “Whose birthday is it?” Jana asked.

  “Who knows? It’s one of the things you forget. So we have a birthday party once a week just in case.”

  Jana searched her memory. Michael’s birthday was missing. It seemed impossible that she didn’t know when it was. He was a Leo, she thought. Or was she?

  The Slider drew on her cigarette, watching Jana’s face. “Someone can check your gravestone if it matters to you,” she said. A narrow white finger of smoke rose from the back of the girl’s head. She must have gone bowling, Jana thought.

  “Guess not,” Jana said. “Do you know where Mars Dreamcote’s room is?”

  “Sure. All the way to the end of the hall next to the fire escape.”

  “Thank you,” Jana said. She stepped around the table and walked into the boys’ half of the hall. Two Sliders tried to talk to her. She smiled but kept on walking. A neatly penciled sign on the door read Knock. Mars had said they’d leave after dark. It was after dark. Jana knocked.

  Half an hour later, Jana sat on the bench out front with Barry. The Gray wasn’t talking much. She was getting used to that. Grays were like potted plants. Something to look at, but lousy when it came to conversation.

  Headlights blinked twice on the road out front. She hurried to the hole in the fence.

  A police detective was on the phone.

  “I need you to write out a statement and sign it,” he said.

  “Yeah, whatever,” Michael said. “Do you always call people this late?”

  “It’s been a long day,” the detective apologized. “What can I tell you? This isn’t our top priority. Routine paperwork is all. I don’t get it done, I get in trouble. You understand that, don’t you? It’s like homework. It doesn’t always matter, but you have to get it done.”

  “The whole thing was an accident,” Michael said. “She fell and hit her head on her bowling ball. I don’t know what else I can tell you.”

  “Oh, that will do. You just write that out for me. I have to file your statement is all. You were a witness. It’s entirely routine, Mr. Haynes. I have to do a chain-of-events type thing. You know, she picked up the ball. She walked over there. She fell down. Look, I can come by your school tomorrow and we can do it there.”

  “No,” Michael said. That was the last thing he needed. “I’ll drop by like you said. It’s across from the courthouse?”

  “Park in the municipal lot. I’ll give you a voucher. What do we say, then? Ten o’clock?”

  “Ten’s okay.”

  “We’re all set, then. Hey, look, I know this must be an emotional time for you, Mr. Haynes. But the sooner we do this the better. You were going to get married, right?”

  “No,” Michael said. “Nothing like that.”

  “Oh, okay. I had that wrong, then. Say, she wasn’t pregnant, was she?”

  “Of course not.” Michael’s hand started shaking. He moved his phone to the other one.

  “Wait,” the detective said, seemingly distracted. “I’ve got it right here. Her blood report. Oh, of course, you’re both good kids. I can see that. Let’s see, you’re going to college at the end of the year, is that right? Early entry in the summer. Leadership scholarship . . .” He sounded like he was reading a list. “Dartmouth, what do you know. Ten o’clock, then, tomorrow, and I can get this paperwork out of the way.”

  The detective finally hung up. The investigator was lying, Michael decided. They’ll say anything to get you to talk. It was more than paperwork he had on his mind. As for “chain of events,” Michael was the one who was chained to events. He didn’t deserve this. He couldn’t believe Jana had done this to him. She fell down the wrong way and now they were going to ruin his life over it.

  Mars drove into the mountains south of Asheville. The automatic transmission of the car they’d borrowed geared down for every climb on the winding state road that brought them nearer to their jumping-off place.

  “Lookaway Rock,” Wyatt said from the backseat. “Elevation somewhere around four thousand feet, but you don’t fall that far.”

  Occasionally they approached a dark rise of mountain that shone with the scattered lights of houses. You couldn’t see the mountains at night and the lights looked like stars hung low in the sky.

  “Give me your hand,” Jana told Wyatt. He did. She tried Michael’s number on her cell one more time. He still wouldn’t answer. She guessed she didn’t blame him.

  “Most jumpers do the waterfall,” Wyatt said. “You stand over to one side and just step off. It’s easier.”

  Lookaway Rock was a much longer drop. It was over three hundred feet of vertical granite left over from the movement of glaciers during the Ice Age. The cliff marked the steep end of a mountain gorge and was shaped like the inside of a horseshoe at the top. From the bottom it looked like a waterfall itself, but Lookaway was pure rock.

  “You can jump off anywhere and not feel a thing until you hit bottom,” Wyatt said. “It’s tricky, though, because the entire curve of rock slopes off at the top, toward the open sky. You get vertigo standing there and that’s how it got its name. To keep your balance on the rock, you have to look away.”

  It sounded scary to Jana. Truly, awfully, dreadfully scary. She hoped Michael appreciated what she was about to go through.

  “Tell me why you do this again,” she said.

  Jana had a goal. She was jumping so she could become a Slider. Mars and Wyatt were jumping just to jump.

  Wyatt laughed.

  “It’s the ultimate extreme,” he said. “It’s the absolute most, like standing in front of a freight train. Only your body parts don’t get dragged all over the place when the slam comes. You don’t understand adrenaline until you’ve jumped. You’ll never feel more alive. It’s beautiful.”

  Jana doubted that jumping was beautiful.

  “And the slam. It is so total, Webster. There’s nothing like it you could ever do in real life. Well, not twice, anyway. You’re crushing every bone in your body all in one rush. It’s . . . it’s total.”

  “It’s definitely suicidal,” Jana said. “Why isn’t it suicide?”

  “Because we’re not doing it to quit. When you give up, when you kill yourself to quit, they don’t repair you. That’s suicide. We’re just killing our bodies, because eventually when you’re dead, you figure out you can. It’s a loophole.”

  “I don’t get it,” Jana confessed.

  “Okay, if I cut off my finger in Dead School either on purpose or by accident, it heals itself. We keep the body we died with, remember? So the rest of it, the suicide part, is intent. We’re not killing ourselves to give up and quit the whole show. We’re taking our bodies to the maximum for the thrill of it, Webster, because we know beforehand we’ll get our bodies back.”

  “What if you jumped as a way to, like you said, ‘quit the whole show’?”

  “Then it would be suicide. Suicide is intent. You throw yourself into a raging river in order to end the misery of your pitiful existence and you drown, that’s suicide. You throw yourself into the same raging river at the same spot at the very same time, but you’re doing it to escape a forest fire and you think you might have a chance to survive . . . well, it’s not suicide, even though you drown.”

  Wyatt paused. “Got it?”

  “I got it,” Jana said. “I’m not an idiot or anything. But it’s a tricky distinction, you have to admit.”

  “That’s why you have us, Webster. We’ve done all the moral groundwork of being dead for you. Sliders are good for that. It’s on our minds a lot once we get here.”

  They’d reached the turnoff from the highway. Mars drove the car on to
a dirt road, then crossed a one-lane bridge over an expanse of rushing water. The rise of trees and mountains on Jana’s side of the car blocked the sky.

  “They give us our bodies here for I don’t know how long,” Wyatt said. “They make me drag this mangled leg around and talk out of half my mouth. I don’t even care why. I just want to know for how long.”

  Neither Mars nor Jana suggested an answer.

  Wyatt kept talking. “You’ve got a lot of time to kill here, Webster. You can’t just sit around paying attention to all that bullshit in school. So we do something. And if you’re going to do something . . . it might as well be the most you can do. We don’t do this to quit. We do this to get a jump on life.”

  He laughed at himself.

  Mars pulled the car into a small turnout alongside the road. Two guys stood in front of a pickup truck parked back into the tall weeds. They both came over. They were Sliders from school. One of them leaned by the driver’s window to talk to Mars.

  “All clear,” he said.

  “There’re no campers up there tonight? Nobody parking?”

  “No one but you. And your sidekick.”

  “Hey, don’t call me that,” Wyatt said from the backseat. “You’re making fun of the way I walk.”

  The guy from the pickup glanced at Jana.

  “How is she getting down?” he asked.

  “We have to go back and get the car anyway,” Mars said. “She’ll keep an eye on it for us.”

  The Slider looked at Jana one more time and let it linger. “Cute dance you did today,” he said to her. “You should come up to the third floor again and show us how you do that.”

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  “ARE THERE SNAKES?”

  Jana needed to know. She also worried about putting her hand on a spider in the dark, or having one shimmy up her leg as she walked by.

  “Snakes only come out at night if you build a fire,” Wyatt told her. “The things to watch out for are nighthawks and owls. Owls are bigger than you think.”

  Jumping off a cliff was one way to test her resolve and her devotion to Michael, Jana thought. Getting there at night was another. And on top of that, she now had to worry about getting an owl in her hair.

  “Do they land on your shoulders or what?”

  “Nah,” Wyatt drawled. “They just fly by and peck your eyes out. I’m surprised you didn’t ask about panthers. They say they’re extinct in this mountain range, but people who live up this way say they still hear a panther scream now and then at night.”

  The trails along the top ridge and highest slopes of the mountain followed old, overgrown logging roads. Pieces of the trails were washed away by weather. Fallen trees crossed the rutted paths here and there no matter which way you chose.

  “Turn on your flashlight, Webster,” Mars said. He touched Jana on the shoulder. “It’s just a path. There aren’t any panthers.”

  Jana switched on her light and moved the beam across the face of the woods they were about to enter. It looked dangerous.

  “I’ll go first,” Mars said. “Webster, grab my belt loop with one hand and come behind me. Wyatt will bring up the rear. Just hold on to my belt. When we have to climb over a log or something, I’ll stop and help you.”

  It was pitch black under the trees. Jana kept her flashlight on her feet. She only let go of Mars’s belt once, when she slipped clambering over a fallen tree.

  “Hoot,” Wyatt said behind her. “Hoot, hoot.”

  “Not funny,” Jana said.

  The long, curving expanse of Lookaway Rock seemed to glow in the darkness as they neared. The giant slice of granite caught what light there was from the stars and the waning moon. Shadows moved across the rock as swirls of mountain fog opened holes to the night sky, then quickly closed them.

  “From the bottom, they say you can see pictures on the cliff when moonlight comes through the fog,” Mars told her. “It’s supposed to be like watching a movie.”

  Jana directed the beam of her flashlight into the sky beyond the cliff’s edge. The light dead-ended in darkness.

  “I wonder if they can see you fall,” she said.

  “Sure they can,” Wyatt said. “Hey, Webster, I’m going to be a movie star instead of you tonight. How’s my makeup?” He pointed his flashlight at his face, rolling his one eye to make it look straight up. “Is my hair all right?”

  The three of them stood at the outer edge of the rock, a few yards back from the sheer drop into the bare darkness of night. The rock was edged with a carpet of juniper moss.

  Light gusts of air rode the rise of warmth from the floor of the gorge. Updrafts moved over the rock like water, cutting the legs out from under the fog. Swirls of mist danced over the rock. Jana stood close to Mars. There was enough light in the open air that she could see the breeze move the tips of his dark hair. It shimmered.

  Wyatt turned off his flashlight. He handed it to Jana.

  “If we’re all set, I’m out of here,” he said.

  Mars tensed as Wyatt moved away from them, listing forward until he was standing on the rock, in the center of the curve of sloping granite that only a few yards out disappeared into the black sky. Wyatt leaned into the mist, into the night.

  “Hey, Webster,” he called back in a whisper full of ragged breath. “Aren’t you going to tell me to break a leg?”

  He lurched into an odd-looking run that reminded Jana of the backside of a camel. Wyatt swung his injured leg wildly forward and hurried his good leg to catch up so he could do it again. She watched him disappear.

  The distant, falling scream sounded like someone riding a roller coaster. A roller coaster that didn’t come back. The scream grew faint, but it never seemed to stop.

  Jana began to tremble. She was afraid. It came over her like a wave. She dropped her flashlight. It pointed nowhere.

  “Don’t leave,” she said. Wrapping her arm around Mars’s waist, she leaned against him. As she held him, the night breeze moved across her face. She closed her eyes. Every part of her body was real. “Don’t leave me here.”

  “I won’t,” Mars said. “I’m here.”

  Jana dropped Wyatt’s flashlight and placed her other arm around Mars and squeezed. She was so tired of being alone, of being dead alone.

  She pressed her face against his chest. His arms were around her. Mars was touching her low in the middle of her back. He was holding her. His flashlight dropped to the carpet of moss at their feet. Its beam of light crossed the dimmer glow from Jana’s flashlight that lay nearby.

  Jana told herself she wasn’t going to cry. She felt fully human, fully comfortable and comforted for the first time since she’d died. She wanted to go to sleep like this, and sleep for a very long time.

  “It’s okay,” Mars said quietly.

  But it wasn’t okay, Jana thought. It wasn’t okay at all. She wanted to feel this way with Michael, not with Mars.

  “What are you afraid of?” he asked. “Are you afraid of me?”

  Mars had asked her what she was afraid of before. “I’m afraid of being dead,” Jana said. This time she added, “And I’m afraid of being alive.”

  “I know.” His words were spoken so quietly they sounded like breathing and nothing else. “It’s okay,” Mars said again. “I know.”

  Jana didn’t say a word.

  “I’ll go back with you if you want to go back.”

  Mars was so warm, too warm. Her thoughts wouldn’t hold while she was wrapped in the tremors of heat that came from the outside in and then, oddly, rose from inside her own living body. Mars was giving her earthly, physical life when he held her.

  She forced herself to push away. She was going to jump. It was the only way she could become a Slider in time to do something about getting Michael back.

  “Look,” she said. “I’m going through with it. I’ve thought about it. If you hold me, I can jump.”

  Mars cleared his throat. His hand touched his hair.

  “I want to tell you som
ething first,” he said. “There’s something I know and I should have told you sooner. I just didn’t know how. I didn’t know if you would believe me.”

  Jana waited. Then she remembered. “It’s that murder stuff,” she said, surprised that she had thought of it. “You were trying to tell me I was murdered since first period, first day. And showing me the lubricant spray on my bowling shoe, is that what you meant? Do you think Sherry murdered me?”

  “No,” Mars said. “Michael is the one who sprayed your shoe. It wasn’t Sherry. It wasn’t Nathan. I watched it happen. He would have sprayed the other one if you had looked away a little longer.”

  Jana considered it. It came down to intent, just like the difference between jumping and suicide. Michael hadn’t meant to hurt her. He certainly had no intention of killing her.

  What Michael did was a stupid joke, she thought, but nothing more than that. She had made them go bowling. So he was getting even. It was supposed to be funny. Michael just thought she would slide around and look goofy . . . and everyone would laugh. Including Jana.

  “He didn’t mean to kill me, Mars,” she said. “He didn’t want me dead. He just . . . he was just being a boy.”

  Mars listened carefully. Her response was what he had feared it would be. Her love for Michael was that strong, that big. When someone loves someone else that much, you don’t try to kick holes in it. It wouldn’t do Jana any good not to love Michael. It was all she had. It was everything.

  “He killed me,” she said more brightly, “so I’ll kill him.”

  Mars didn’t think it was funny.

  “To do that, I have to jump,” she added.

  Her plan was in place. She was in the seventh maze. The one that Mr. Skinner hadn’t drawn yet. You didn’t turn left. You didn’t turn right. You turned an entirely new way. One you had never tried before.

  “I know it’s not written down in that antique book word for word like this,” Jana said. “I know it’s not certain, but it’s pretty clear to everyone—to you, me, and Jameson. If I jump, I’ll come out of it a Slider.”