You Are Dead.

by Andrew Stanek

  The rest of it was pretty easy. The trick was to look at yourself when you reached Albany, and then the wave function would collapse, etc., and you would be in New York.

  Naturally, this device was such a stunning and powerful technological breakthrough that it could only be entrusted to travel agents, who swore to use it only for good. They located it in Dead Donkey, where they used it to help people leave the city (and if that isn’t good, nothing is).

  Looking at the teleportation machine, Nathan assumed it was putting icing on extremely large cakes. The mere thought immediately made him the third wrongest man alive, behind Stephen Hawking and Travis Erwin Habsworth, and considerably ahead of people who think shaving off their eyebrows makes them more attractive.

  “This is a teleportation machine,” the supervisor informed Nathan summarily.

  “Oh,” Nathan said. His musings about who would eat such a large cake and what it might taste like instantly vanished, and he dropped a few billion places down the wrongness charts.

  “In a moment I will activate the machine and take you to Albany,” the supervisor continued. “But first I need you to agree that you will not disclose the secret of the teleportation device to anyone. Otherwise we get to send you to Australia.”

  “Alright,” Nathan agreed.

  “I’ll need you to sign this form to that effect,” the man said. He crossed to the part of the room where Nathan was standing, in the dim twilight, produced a clipboard with a small form on it, and offered it to Nathan.

  Nathan moved to sign it.

  “Incidentally,” Nathan asked just before he did, “what is that?”

  He pointed to the customer satisfaction survey.

  The supervisor briefly glanced at it.

  “Nothing to worry about. I’m afraid that only one person in the whole world knows exactly how this device works and he is not here.”

  “Oh. It looked like a customer satisfaction survey to me.”

  Nathan signed the form, and the supervisor quickly countersigned.

  The moment he did so, Nathan recognized several important points about the supervisor. He was about six and a half feet tall. His hair was a formidable brown-gray, and his eyes were dark and totally merciless. He was not wearing a tie.

  Director Fulcher whooped and snatched the Form 21B from Nathan’s grasp. Nathan grabbed at it but missed, and Fulcher quickly pocketed it.

  “I’ve got you at last,” Fulcher said cheerily.

  Nathan bowed his head in an admission of defeat. “You did indeed,” Nathan said. “I should have known better. Did you teleport Travis first-”

  “Deliberately, yes,” Fulcher said. “To separate you from him, so he couldn’t get in the way like he did last time. This has all been my setup. I knew you would come to the travel agency to escape the city, so I took the liberty of taking the place over. I think you’ll agree, my plan was most efficacious.”

  “Very ingenious,” Nathan agreed. “It must have taken a lot of planning.”

  “It took a certain amount of strategy, yes,” Fulcher said calmly. “But now that I have your 21B, your papers are in order - more or less. There will be no more resurrection for you, Mr. Haynes. The next time you die, it will be the end of you, and you’ll have to stay in the afterlife, just like everyone else. But as a gesture of respect, just to demonstrate that you were a worthy opponent, the next time you die, I will process your file myself. Professional courtesy, from one gentleman to another.”

  “Thank you,” Nathan said. “That means a lot to me.”

  Behind them, the door opened and Brian slumped into the room.

  “I’m very disappointed in you, Mr. Dithershoes,” Director Fulcher said. “You haven’t made any substantive action towards obtaining Mr. Haynes’ signature at all. In the end I had to do everything myself. So I am afraid-”

  Brian cringed. “-no! Not that!”

  “-you’ll have to continue on as Brian!”

  Like a wounded wolf, Brian let out a soul-wrenching scream of despair, but Fulcher was not swayed. A second form appeared in Fulcher’s hand, which he signed, and then he disappeared into thin air, with Nathan’s 21B in his pocket.

  So Nathan was left with Brian in the cold, dark, lonely room.

  Chapter 29

  Brian was hammering half-heartedly on Nathan’s chest between his tears.

  “This - is - all - your - fault,” he stammered.

  “I don’t really see how you can think it’s my fault,” Nathan shot back. “I mean, if it hadn’t been for me you never would have gotten the opportunity to change names in the first place. What’s so bad about your name anyway? I think Brian-”

  Brian wailed horribly. Between his sobs he was filling out a Form 88059 - Request For Authorization To Wallow In Despair, a Form 719438 - Authorization To Focus Abject Hatred On Another Human Being, and a Form 683732 - Notification Of The Start of a Vendetta.

  Nathan patted him on the shoulder in consolation for a while, then decided he had better things to do than console bureaucrats and walked away. The travel agent and the security guard were gone from the lobby. Nathan supposed they had both been bureaucrats in disguise as well, or else acting on their behalf, and had deserted their posts since their task was fulfilled. He walked out into the cool of Dead Donkey’s early evening, the scenic sunset in the distance complemented by the city’s burning skyline. He sniffed the air, heavy with the musk of accelerants and raw sewage. He paused and listened to the distant melodious hum of the xylophone fences and the revolutionary yells of the Pluto Liberation Front, punctuated by the sounds of violent fighting and even more violent games of Muleball. He smiled to himself, because this was his home.

  After lingering on the step of the travel agency for a minute or two, enjoying the ambiance, Nathan made his way back to his car, broke in, started the engine and drove back to his home. A familiar pump-action shotgun sounded as he careened around the corner onto his block. The ensuing blast of buckshot knocked out one of his tires and sent metal shrapnel pinging in the vacant passenger compartment of his car.

  “Whoops, sorry about that,” Mr. Fletcher called out from his perch. “I was aiming for the streetlights.”

  Nathan looked around and saw most of the streetlights had been shot out. He sighed.

  “Have you been shooting out the lights again?” he asked.

  “They have been sneaking up on my property,” Mr. Fletcher insisted, and took another shot at the streetlights.

  Nathan took to the sidewalk, passed the huddled mess of wounded salesmen who had taken cover from Mr. Fletcher behind the fence, and approached his own door. He opened it and walked inside, kicked his shoes off, and started to whistle while he thought about doing his laundry. He went to the bathroom and washed some of the copious blood off of his hands, then realized he was quite hungry and went to the kitchen to make himself a sandwich. While he was getting the bread and mayo out, he looked out his window and saw his stack of corpses piled high in the backyard wheelbarrow and realized with a tinge of annoyance that he hadn’t figured out what to do about them yet. After he put down his mayo knife, he resolved to call the morgue or the university or the pet shop or whoever he could interest in a pile of bones and picked up the phone receiver.

  The line was dead.

  Nathan quickly traced the cable with his finger and found it had been cut cleanly in two.

  Just that moment, the lights came on in his living room. There, sitting in the greenest of Nathan’s several green chairs, was the serial killer.

  “Good evening,” the serial killer said cheerily.

  “Hello,” Nathan responded pleasantly. “Would you like some sandwiches? I was just making them.”

  “You know, on balance I am feeling a little peckish. If it’s not too much of an imposition...”

  “Not at all,” Nathan said, and made his serial killer a sandwich.

  “Of course, I don’t normally eat while I’m on the job,” the serial killer continued. “It can caus
e problems with the authorities down the line.”

  “Ah,” replied Nathan. “Bureaucracy. You don’t need to tell me about bureaucracy. I’ve had about as much bureaucracy as I can handle today.”

  He handed his serial killer a plate with a sandwich on it. The serial killer accepted it and ate it gratefully.

  “I’m famished,” he explained as he wolfed it down.

  “I am too,” Nathan said. “I haven’t had anything to eat all day except airplane food, a bagel, and a badger’s whisker, and that was very accidental.”

  The serial killer licked his fingers clean, then crossed his legs and reclined himself into a slightly relaxed yet still very business-like position.

  “Now, I felt that we ought to have a little chat. I’ve killed you twice now, but you’re not dead.”

  “I’m not,” confirmed Nathan.

  “I wanted to ask you: why is that, exactly? Why do you keep coming back to life?”

  And with that, Nathan launched into his lengthy story, which involved Brian and Ian and Donna and Director Fulcher and Travis and much more arson than Nathan had realized was going on at the time, but memories are like that. Nathan explained that his papers had not been in order so Director Fulcher kept restoring him to a life as a matter of necessity.

  The serial killer listened patiently to all this and then, finally, nodded in understanding.

  “So it was all an administrative mix up. I should have known it was something like that. If there’s one thing that can be relied on to get in the way in life, it’s bureaucracy.” He sighed. “Well, fortunately, it’s all worked itself out. I suppose that we can put this behind us now that you’ve signed your 21B and put your papers in order. Now you can die and stay dead - unless they have some other important form for you to sign when you die.”

  “I don’t think so. Director Fulcher seemed very happy when he vanished off into nothing.”

  “Good, good. Then I can kill you. I know I’ve told you this all before but it’s extremely important that I kill you. If word got around that I tried to kill you but you’d come back to life - why - my reputation would be ruined. I regret it a little bit, Nathan, but it’s all part of the job.”

  “I understand.”

  The serial killer took out his silenced pistol and flipped off the safety.

  “Before you kill me, can I ask you a question?”

  “Certainly,” the serial killer answered. “Since you’ve been so civil with me... not many people are civil with serial killers. It’s all boos and jeers and screams of terror. I don’t like it. It gets very depressing after a while.”

  “I imagine it would.”

  “What was your question?”

  “How did you become a serial killer?”

  The serial killer told him. It was a much more complete answer than the serial killer had given than when Nathan had asked him just before his first murder. It was a tale of sadness and woe, but ultimately personal triumph.

  The serial killer was living his dream. He had always wanted to do what he did now, ever since he was a little serial killer. He’d had a difficult childhood. His father had beaten him - beaten him at checkers, so the serial killer had killed him. After that life had gotten very hard for him, and he’d been shuttled from foster family to foster family, each of whom died in a series of mysterious and unrelated bloody knife accidents. Then the serial killer had grown up a little bit and gone to college, where he had studied criminology and medical psychology and taken a personality test that said he was perfectly suited to serial killer work, so he’d decided to give it a try for real. He’d started serial killing professionally (instead of his previous hobbyist work) in the streets of Dead Donkey as a relatively young man, where he’d had to compete with the Muleball Players’ Association and the Confederation of Street Thugs for the attention of the local and international news media. Fortunately, he had eventually been able to overcome them by killing them, in a very scrappy, come-from-behind underdog win kind of a way. After he’d disposed of the MPA and the CST, wiping out a good chunk of the Dead Donkey Drug Dealers’ and Pimps’ Organization while he was at it, he had started to gain local fame for his many serial killing exploits. He considered his crowning achievement and the peak of his fame to be his successful execution of the Regio Boulevard parking attendant, who had long been considered by Dead Donkey serial killers to be the trickiest kill in the whole city. The parking attendant had sent him a posthumous letter of congratulations for his substantial skill at random assassination. From there it had all seemed like it was looking up, but the international news media just hadn’t been that impressed. His kill rate, in terms of raw people, just wasn’t competitive with some of the other nationally acknowledged serial killers - household names like the Parksfield Pulverizer and the Bagtown Liquidator, the latter of whom had once killed the entire population of Montana with nothing but an uncapped pen. So, the serial killer had to conduct more and more random killings in order to get his name out there, and to that end he had come to Nathan’s house earlier that afternoon with a silenced pistol in his hand and a dream in his heart.

  “That was very moving,” Nathan said, after the serial killer had finished his story. “I hope you’re able to kill lots and lots of people in the future,” he said.

  “Me too,” the serial killer said emphatically as he checked his silencer. “I just know I’ll make the FBI Most Wanted list one of these days.”

  “I have one more question though.”

  “Shoot. Not literally, of course. I’m the one doing the shooting here.”

  “When I was with my acquaintance, Travis Habsworth, he said that he thought there was some sort of intelligence behind your murdering me. A plot or scheme of some kind. Do you know anything about that?”

  The serial killer shook his head.

  “I’m sorry, but I’m a freelancer. I don’t have any plot or scheme except killing the people in front of me.” He gave a jolly smile.

  “Ah, so it’s just coincidence then?”

  “Yes, just coincidence.”

  “You see, I ask because you somehow knew I came back to life after the first time. Do you remember?”

  The serial killer frowned. “Yes... I heard about it through a colleague of mine.” He shrugged and his frown disappeared. “Never mind that now. It’s not important. I’m just going to go ahead and kill you so I can get home. I have a long commute.”

  He checked his silencer one last time and pressed the barrel of his pistol to Nathan’s head.

  There was a gunshot, but this time Nathan’s world did not go black. Nathan felt the gun slip away from his temple and turned to see the serial killer slump down to the ground, dead.

  Chapter 30

  Nathan sat back in one of the less green of his several green chairs, stunned. He hadn’t been expecting that.

  A man Nathan had never seen before emerged from the shadows of Nathan’s hallway. This man was tall with orderly brown hair and sunken eyes. He wore a sweeping kind of a robe.

  “Hello, Nathan,” the man said. He sat down in the greenest chair that the serial killer had only just recently vacated.

  “You killed him,” Nathan said, outraged. “He was my serial killer. I liked him! And you killed him!”

  “I did,” the robed man confirmed. “But it was necessary. He was about to kill you.”

  “I don’t mind being killed, but it wasn’t necessary to kill him,” Nathan retorted.

  “Ah, but it is quite necessary to my plans that you survive. You will not be nearly so useful to me dead as alive.”

  “What do you mean?” Nathan demanded. “Who are you?”

  “I am Quaestor Dominique Delroy.”

  He paused dramatically. Nathan stared at him blankly. He had no idea who Quaestor Dominique Delroy was supposed to be.

  “The Archdiogenian,” elaborated Delroy. “The Grand Interlocutor.”

  Nathan continued to stare at him blankly.

  “The Conmystic Logos,” Delr
oy said insistently. “The Specifist’s Designated One.”

  “Do you run a clothing store?” Nathan guessed tentatively.

  “I’m head of the Church of Particularly Cynical Atheists,” Delroy informed Nathan, looking a bit miffed that he’d had to spell it out. “I’m the most powerful atheist in Dead Donkey.”

  This was saying something. Nathan sat up a little. His mind cast around for something to say to a man of position and authority in his home.

  “Can I offer you a sandwich?” he said at length.

  “No thank you,” the Conmystic Logos replied. “I came to fetch you.”

  “Why?”

  “I am the person you asked our dead friend about.” He kicked the serial killer with his foot. “I told him that you could be found here, and when you came back to life I told him about that too. It was necessary for my plans. The serial killer was just a cog in the works - an unknowing tool to be used by greater men.”

  Nathan assumed that Delroy was going to tell him what plan he was talking about, so Nathan sat quietly and thought about the cereal jingle again.

  As expected, the Designated One began to explain zealously.

  “I’ve long since realized that the universe must be run by bureaucrats. After all, if there is no god, there has to be someone running this whole universe, and if it’s not god, it’s got to be bureaucrats. That’s only common sense. But not everyone sees it that way. Some very foolish people persist in believing that god exists and that life has meaning. I aim to change all that, but in order to convince the holdouts, I needed someone who could go to see for themselves what it was like on the other side - beyond the pale - in the world of death, where the bureaucrats live. Unfortunately, it’s very difficult to find someone like that, because once you die, you’re dead and you can’t talk to anyone... but, if I could find someone whose papers were not in order, then I could use him. He would die and witness what lies beyond, then be sent back to life by the bureaucrats and tell us about it. We searched far and wide for such a person, and we finally came across you.”