You Are Dead.

by Andrew Stanek

  Fulcher inspected it with a frown. “It is true that with this added to your file, I will have great difficulty in declaring you insane, although I maintain that the fact that you have now died... What is it? Four times today... speaks for itself.”

  “I don’t think any of them were really my fault,” Nathan said. “Badger attacks can happen to anyone. Besides, I quite enjoy dying. You have a lovely office.”

  “The loveliness of my office is not at issue here,” Fulcher snapped. He quickly stowed a little doily he was using as a coaster back in its drawer. “The point is that you must eventually sign your 21B and remain here after death! It is mandatory!”

  “But that doesn’t mean I have to do it,” Nathan argued.

  “That is exactly what it means!”

  “I know that you’ve sent Brian, Ian, and Donna after me already.”

  “Yes. I was most displeased that Donna failed to obtain your signature. I’m sure you have realized by now that it was I who put your wallet back on your body so you would be compelled to pay for the coffees...”

  “Are you going to keep sending bureaucrats to force me to try to sign your form?”

  “Yes. Until the job gets done.”

  “Oh, that’s too bad,” Nathan said. “You’ll probably get very mad at all of them when they fail.”

  Fulcher’s face got very red.

  “You have some nerve to come in here and say that to me, Mr. Haynes, I must say... But I will tell you again: I will get your papers in order, no matter what it takes. Goodbye, Mr. Haynes.”

  And with that he signed some unseen form and Nathan was zapped back to life.

  Chapter 24

  Everyone alive knows someone who seems to be effortlessly better off than they are. This someone drives a faster car, lives in a bigger house, eats at nicer restaurants, and spends time with more attractive people than the observer. Most frustrating, this someone appears to do no real work but is instead massively overcompensated for having sold stocks at the right time or gone to business school or been born the child of a terminally ill billionaire. Generally, amid a sense of building resentment and hatred, we the observers shake our heads and feel that some people - some immensely unpleasant and undeserving people - have all the luck and the rest of us are stuck with none.

  This isn’t quite right. Sociologists have attempted to discern why the faster-car, bigger-house, nicer-restaurant-goers (FBNs) exist and have devised a theory of social relativity, stating that all success must be measured relative to the observer but regardless of your success relative to any other object, you still appear to have the same success relative to any FBN. This doesn’t make any sense, and in fact is a load of nonsense.

  The real reason FBNs exist is that they have bribed the cosmic bureaucrats. The trick to winning at life isn’t working hard or staying in school or ruthlessly destroying your enemies, although the last one is immensely satisfying in its own way. Rather, it is to slip a cosmic bureaucrat a few twenties at the right time, ideally shortly before you are born, and then just ride the wave of good fortune that comes your way thereafter. If you manage to find a corruptible bureaucrat, they will be more than happy to push a 5074784 - Authorization To Live A Charmed Life - your way and then it will be pretty much all uphill for you thereafter. Bureaucrats are generally overworked, underpaid, and unhappy with their jobs and are often eager to accept a few bucks in exchange for a favor.

  Of course, corruption is a matter of deep concern to the bureaucratic leadership and they have renewed their commitment to stamp it out by forming the Exploratory Committee on the Committee on the Committee on the Committee to Design A Process To Introduce a Form To Deliver Swift Retribution Against Corrupt Personnel, or they would have formed it except the motion got held up in committee. Corruption therefore remains endemic among the bureaucrats of the next world, and they’ll help you out if you help them out. A hundred dollars and a few smokes is usually a good starting point, but if you’re a clever negotiator you can often get the price down to fifty. Some bureaucrats offer discounts for the whole family.

  If Nathan had done this at any of his several opportunities, he would probably have lived a very happy life and not had to worry about any of the things he did now: ie: planes crashing into the ground and badgers breaking into his house and attacks by clowns (which had not happened to him yet but he was very worried about). However, since he lacked that kind of foresight and business acumen, he was stuck always a heartbeat away from the next badger and/or clown attack, which he was starting to regard as very inconvenient.

  Chapter 25

  “Welcome back,” Travis told Nathan when he rematerialized. They were standing in the wreckage of the plane and the school, respectively, the unrecognizable remains of the pilot, stewardess, teacher, Educator, and Nathan’s own body somewhere underneath the plane. Bags that certainly weren’t theirs were strewn all over the place.

  Travis, however, looked totally untouched. He had Brian - also completely unscathed - under one arm. He had Nathan’s salad in his free hand, and he was munching on it.

  “This is good,” he agreed. “You must forgive me - I only had time to save one of you and the salad, so I chose Brian. I thought that he shouldn’t have a chance to report back to his superiors if it could at all be avoided.”

  “But how did you survive?” Nathan asked.

  “Laws are merely the invention of bureaucrats and have no power over me. Gravity - death - these things are all in the mind.”

  “Oh. And New York too?”

  “No. New York is real.”

  “That explains everything,” Nathan said with a nod. He looked around in the debris and spotted his can of cola which, although somewhat flatter than it had been previously, was still intact. He picked it up and sipped the remaining dregs of liquid from it.

  “It’s frothier than before,” he commented. “Anyway, what should we do now? It’s getting a bit late. Maybe we should go back to my house.”

  “Your serial killer will be looking for you back at your home. Also, the bureaucrats will expect you to return to Dead Donkey. We must take you to Albany. I have prepared a safe house for you there.”

  “How can a house be safe from bureaucrats?”

  “I filled it with the things bureaucrats fear. Pink slips. Improperly filed forms. Stern letters from politicians. Electronic form-filing systems that render them obsolete. They will not be able to harm you there. But first we have to get to Albany. We must obtain transport. I would prefer something ground based.”

  “Well, we could pretend that you’re rich. Then the city would give you a car to go away.”

  “Excuse me?” Travis said politely.

  The city of Dead Donkey had a problem a few years ago: owing to a growing urban gentrification movement and dramatically increased popularity of xylophone fences, arson, and dieting spoons, a lot of rich people suddenly started appearing in Dead Donkey. Residents complained that they didn’t want the city full of some stuck up rich people who looked down on them, and asked the mayor to get up off his butt and do something about it for once.

  The mayor concluded that, logically speaking, the rich people wouldn’t leave unless they had a way to leave, and that they therefore needed cars. Following this excellent line of reasoning, he started the Dead Donkey cars 4 rich people program, which came (literally) hot on the heels of the wildly successful flamethrowers 4 arsonists program. However, like the flamethrowers, the program backfired. No matter how many cars the mayor gave to the rich people on the city’s dime, they insisted on staying where they were. In fact, a lot of them seemed to be doubling down. As a stopgap measure, the mayor started handing out money with the cars as well, in the hopes that paying the rich people would cause them to go away, but this didn’t work either.

  The Mayor of Dead Donkey is not very popular.

  However, Nathan had no time to explain this to Travis (who would not have understood it anyway since he did not believe in money), because a large red f
iretruck screeched to a halt not fifteen feet away from them. As soon as it stopped, the siren turned on.

  “No you idiot,” one of the firefighters clinging to the side shouted, “you’re supposed to turn it on before we get here.”

  Someone inside the engine shouted a muffled apology.

  The firefighters clambered off the side of the truck. One rolled out a hose and stared at it skeptically for a moment, then looked down the barrel as if he didn’t know exactly how to work it. After he fiddled with the nozzle for a second, a burst of water came out and hit him in the face.

  There was a dark laugh from inside the firetruck.

  “Idiot!” the laughing voice called. “You’re supposed to turn it on, then point it at your face, not point it at your face then turn it on.”

  “I take it,” Travis said quietly, “that this is the Dead Donkey fire department.”

  “It is,” Nathan confirmed.

  As the firefighters argued about whether or not they were supposed to water the nearby trees or instead create a circle of water to surround the burning school house, Nathan stood up, dusted himself off, and walked up to them. Travis followed, with the still unconscious Brian under one arm.

  “Hello,” Nathan said to the nearest firefighter. “Can you take us back to the city?”

  “I dunno,” the firefighter said dubiously. “My job description doesn’t say anything about rescuing people.”

  “Maybe you could try it just for a laugh,” Travis suggested, sliding Brian into an empty seat in the firetruck. “You might enjoy it.”

  The firefighters huddled up and discussed this possibility for a second while their little wiener dog ran around yipping at their heels. Travis gave it the bacon bits from his salad and it barked happily as it licked them off the muddy ground (the ground was muddy because the hose was flooding the nearby earth with about a thousand gallons of water).

  The circle of firefighters reached a decision after a few minutes of nattering, during which time the aircraft wreckage seemed to have conveniently extinguished itself.

  “Alright,” one of the firefighters said as the circle broke up. “We’ll drive you back to the city. But if our supervisor or anyone else asks, you’ll tell them that this was a false alarm. Agreed?”

  “Agreed,” Nathan said, and piled into the cabin next to Travis and the unconscious Brian.

  Chapter 26

  The practice of recreational drinking in the city of Dead Donkey has taken a rather unusual turn. Historically, Dead Donkey always had the highest average alcohol consumption per capita in the world but a median alcohol consumption amounting to virtually nothing. What any public policy analyst could tell you, provided they could be bothered to stop burning down the city long enough to do so, was that this meant a very small number of people in the city had a very big alcohol problem. This is because while most of Dead Donkey’s various residents found one way or another to cope with the daily horror of living in the city - insanity, criminal activity, blindness, or participation in local government, for example - a small nucleus of Dead Donkey’s citizenry relied on alcohol to get them through the day. They were generally regarded as the hardest drinking people in the world, collectively consuming approximately a quizillion units of alcohol a day.

  Despite the massive quantity of alcohol consumed, there weren’t very many drinkers because for the longest time there was only one bar in the city, and the regulars in this bar didn’t take kindly to strangers to such an extent that the only time an outsider had ever had drinks there was once in 1986. His obituary had appeared in the paper the next day.

  The aforementioned unusual turn began some years later, when due to worsening terms of trade resulting from the closure of the xylophone fence factory and the mayor’s short-lived decision to abandon the US dollar in favor of the Burmese kyat, the price of beer began to skyrocket in Dead Donkey. Eventually, the beer crisis became so bad that the Dead Donkey drinkers could no longer buy beer for less than the price of the triple-liver-bypass surgeries they relied on to keep themselves alive.

  After one morning of particularly terrifying hangovers, the Dead Donkey barflies resolved to do something about the crisis. They tried to make their own alcohol but soon discovered that this required grain, yeast, and preferably sobriety while operating the still, so this endeavor was quickly abandoned. Then they tried to steal beer, but remembered that theirs was the only bar in Dead Donkey and it didn’t have any. Then they tried to organize a tontine, but realized none of them knew what a tontine was.

  They tried vodka, but decided it tasted terrible, and instead opted for an alternate solution. Recreational drinkers in Dead Donkey now drink a noxious cocktail of battery acid, bitterant, and kerosene called Dead Donkey ale, which they chug down while being pummeled in the head with sticks. Then they sing their favorite songs in slurred voices. This approximately emulates the taste, effect, and experience of drinking actual alcohol, with the added advantage of being less taxing on their internal organs.

  Dead Donkey ale is traditionally served with a slice of orange.

  Knowing all this, you should be able to understand exactly how dire the situation was when Nathan said, “I think I need a drink.”

  The firefighters had just dropped them off in the middle of town. They had not taken them all the way to the fire station because they had seen a building burst into flames in the distance, urgently deposited their passengers on the roadside, then quickly slammed the accelerator to the floor and put as much distance between themselves and that fire as possible.

  To tell the absolute truth, Nathan was feeling a little melancholy. Travis had told him that he couldn’t go home, he was a bit on the tired side, and he had died more times than was normal for him. Brian was looking very pale too, so Nathan concluded they needed a drink, and, as it happened, they were just outside the only bar in Dead Donkey: the Lucky Loser. Nathan pushed open the door to the Lucky Loser. Travis followed him with a shrug, Brian still slung over his shoulder.

  They walked in and something told Nathan that this was a rough bar.

  Maybe it was the large neon sign hanging over the door that said, “This Is A Rough Bar.” Or maybe it was the list of people who had died in bar fights pinned to the wall by a bloody knife; the list itself was written in a font size small enough to baffle the cosmic bureaucrats and fell down almost to the floor. Or maybe it was the pool table, which had a roundish skull for a ball.

  But the overall impression was that this was not a place you wanted to enter unless you were either prepared to fight your way out again or had realized it was the cheapest alternative to Dead Donkey’s airlines to commit an elaborate assisted suicide.

  Fortunately for Nathan, no one was inside to brutally murder him, which the regulars surely would have done if they had been here at the moment. The room was totally empty except for a bartender in a surprisingly nice jacket and tie, standing behind a wooden bar counter. Nathan walked up to it and sat down.

  “What’s your story, fellah?” the bartender asked him. “You look like you’ve had a rough day.”

  “I had a stroke and I was attacked by a badger,” Nathan said. “To be honest, I think that was the best part of my afternoon.”

  “You sound like you need a drink,” the bartender said. He poured him a significant measure of the brown ambiguous liquid from the tap and slid it over to Nathan. One drop trickled down the side of the glass and promptly burned a hole in the bar.

  “Where are all the other customers?” Nathan asked as he contemplated drinking this liquid.

  “They’re all working their shift.”

  “Their shift?” Nathan inquired.

  “They’re all firefighters,” the bartender informed him.

  “All of them?”

  “Well, not all of them. Some of them are arsonists.” He started wiping a nearby glass. “You wouldn’t believe the mess the bar fights make. What’ll you have?” he asked, turning to Travis.

  “Nothing,” Travis repli
ed. “I just wonder if you could tell me how to get out of this city in a hurry.”

  The bartender contemplated this as he wiped his glass. “Tricky,” he said.

  It should be explained that owing to its geographical location, socioeconomic climate, and the fact that no one else in the entire world wants to go to Dead Donkey unless they are completely out of their skulls, there aren’t many transport links to and from Dead Donkey. Aircraft can go in and out of Dead Donkey via the airport, provided they don’t crash and aren’t shot down by the flak batteries that secure the airspace around the city. Dead Donkey has no rail links with the rest of the world, and its one street has such an immense traffic jam in the outgoing direction that many of the commuters have begun to run side businesses out of their cars.

  As many people want to escape Dead Donkey, various alternative transport schemes have been tried over the years. The city council once proposed building a seaport, brushing aside objections that the city is in the middle of the desert. Dead Donkey now has the world’s largest inland seaport, but the California Queen - a supersized cruise ship that is docked in the port - has yet to set sail due to what the captain insists are administrative difficulties and what the US Coast Guard has identified as “sand in the propellers.” Some other methods have also been attempted, though they have generally speaking not borne out very well in practice. Tucker Sanchez, a lifetime resident, constructed a giant slingshot and attempted to launch himself towards California but miscalculated the angle and ended up going straight up and then falling straight back down again. His giant slingshot was subsequently appropriated for use in Muleball games. A handful of residents attempted to convince the federal government that there had been an earthquake in Dead Donkey and that military helicopters needed to be sent to evacuate them. While the nation was briefly shocked and horrified by the videos of human suffering that the residents sent them, the US Geological Survey quickly concluded that the little blip on their seismographs had not in fact been an earthquake but about fifty people jumping up and down at the same time. Rescue efforts were subsequently abandoned.