Dying Day

by Kory M. Shrum

  My last few hours.

  I barely have time to process this idea when Dr. Gray appears in the doorway, breathless.

  “What is it?” Jeremiah asks, turning toward the commotion.

  “It’s Captain Jackson, sir. She’s awake.”

  Chapter 16

  Jesse

  Autumn is crisp and bright. The light soft and slanted of a late afternoon.

  People in black huddle in the middle of the cemetery. I walk toward them, brown, burnt leaves crunching under my black rubber boots.

  The whispering grows louder. “Two at once, how horrible.”

  “What were they doing out there that night?”

  “There’s to be an investigation?”

  “No, didn’t you hear? The authorities swept in and hushed all that up.”

  “Kyle says she was seeing the counselor at school.”

  “Why didn’t Danica have an open casket?”

  “Because the body must’ve been damn ghastly, Mary. Let it be.”

  “Go ask. It isn’t like poor Dani hasn’t hurt enough already.”

  “I would’ve still liked to see. I’ve never seen a burnt body.”

  “You would, you old bat.”

  I cut through the women I don’t recognize, walking toward the one standing closest to the empty grave. Her blond hair whips in the wind. A black rain coat pulled around her. She can’t be more than seventeen. Maisie’s age.

  Her shoulders shake with her crying. When she turns, her eyes lock with me.

  Ally.

  Recognition flashes in those amber eyes. She says my name. I don’t answer. She says it a second time, a third, and the taller boy beside her tries to hush her, pulling her elbow back as she strains forward. This doesn’t work.

  Ally screams.

  She steps forward, but the boy beside her—Eli, I realize, maybe in his early 20s—pulls her back.

  My eyes fall on the etched tombstone.

  Here Lies Jesse Sullivan

  Beloved Daughter

  No.

  No, I—

  A sudden hand shoves me in the back, and I’m pitched forward into the grave, into the endless black.

  My hands hit something hard. A casket, I think. Oh my god, I’m laying on my casket.

  But I open my eyes to see it isn’t a casket, and I’m not in a hole. I’m on my hands and knees on a wood floor. I sit up. Touch my arms and chest tentatively, as if expecting to find myself incorporeal. A ghost. But I feel real enough.

  A soft rolling sound catches my attention, and at last the room shifts into view.

  It’s a small apartment, consisting only of this room and a bathroom so small, I think someone would have to close the door just to sit on the toilet.

  A mattress sits on a low IKEA frame. A girl lays in the bed, eyes open, fixed on the ceiling.

  She’s wearing a t-shirt that falls across her mid-thigh.

  Still crouched on the floor, I watch her sit up on the mattress and cast off the bedding. She walks right past me as if she doesn’t see me and heads into the kitchen area. She makes a bowl of cereal from a bowl on top of a mini fridge and a small half gallon of milk. The spoon is one of the plastic ones that comes from takeout, and she eats the cereal without speaking, leaning against the counter as she chews. Silent. Then she rinses the bowl in the sink and puts the plastic jug in the white fridge. She goes into the bathroom.

  She does all of this without looking at me.

  I pull myself up and go to the bathroom. I push open the door and see Ally’s wet, slicked-back hair.

  The room is full of steam from the hot tap. She sinks to her knees and lets it pound her skin until it’s red.

  “Ally?” I ask. I feel like this is a dream.

  No answer.

  “Al, can you hear me?”

  Her back stays wedged into the corner of the stall. She just sits there, crouched as the water pelts her head and shoulders. It’s a long time before she makes a feeble attempt to run some shampoo through her hair, and soap on her body. I stand frozen in the doorway, steam wafting past me.

  She is so thin I can see her ribs expand, gaunt, with every breath. She shuts off the water. She is shivering before she makes any attempt to get out of the stall.

  Her clothes are in a pile on the floor beside her bed. She grabs the first shirt and pair of jeans that she sees and pulls them on. She runs a red comb through her hair before buttoning up a coat.

  Then she’s down the stairs, out the door, and walking up the street.

  At least I know where we are. St. Louis. I recognize this district near the root beer distillery.

  I follow her. I call her name, and she pauses on the street. People part around her like water around a rock. She turns, very slowly, as if expecting to find a ghost there.

  Maybe I am a ghost.

  Is this the future? Ally’s future after I die? Or her past? I can’t tell.

  But before she fully turns, she seems to change her mind. She starts walking again, taking a moment to tuck her wet hair under the hood of her coat. She’s walking faster.

  At any moment, I feel like she’s going to break into a run.

  Then she steps off the street into a building. A sign reads Trinity Counseling. I don’t see myself reflected in the glass of the door. And I don’t have to touch the door to pass through. One moment, I’m on the street. The next, I’m in the reception area, looking at a blue water cooler and a male receptionist who is humming a Justin Bieber song.

  I must be dead. I saw my funeral, and now I’m a ghost. That must be what happened.

  Time skips. Ally isn’t in the waiting room of the counseling center.

  And from the shifty way the receptionist looks at the closed door, I suspect I know where she’s gone.

  I enter the office building, and no one even tries to stop me. I follow Ally through the reception area and into a smaller office.

  She takes a seat on a rose-colored couch, her hands coming to rest on her knees. Her back is rigid against the sofa. A woman in her late forties or early fifties is holding a Starbucks latte and smiling, nodding along to whatever Ally just said.

  “I think that’s wonderful,” the woman says, her voice melodic and soothing.

  “I wouldn’t call a ‘C’ wonderful,” Ally says. “I need at least a 3.5 to get into a decent law school.”

  “You have to give yourself credit for small victories, Ally,” the therapist says, twisting the cardboard cup in her hands. “Last semester you failed half your courses and withdrew from the rest. This semester, you’re passing everything. You’ve found an apartment in a better part of town. You’re going to class. You’re doing the work.”

  “Barely.”

  “You’ve had your job for three months. You’re paying your bills on time.”

  “I was five days late for my car insurance, actually.”

  “Alice. You have a car,” the woman says, with a gentle laugh. “Progress is progress. When you first came in here, you were contemplating suicide. You were fired from two jobs. You were a stone’s throw from being homeless.”

  “I wouldn’t have been homeless. Eli would have forced me to move to Louisville before he’d let me sleep on the street.”

  Ally wraps her finger around a thread coming from the rose-colored cushion beneath her. I think she’ll tear the thread free, but she keeps twisting it around and around.

  The woman seems okay with the silence. She watches Ally, but says nothing.

  “But I’m not okay,” Ally whispers finally. She looks up and meets the woman’s eyes. Tears stand out in the lashes and shimmer in the light of the lamps. “On the street, just now, I heard her voice. I heard her calling my name.”

  My throat tightens.

  The woman in the chair doesn’t interrupt. But she stops turning the cardboard cup in her hands. When it’s clear Ally isn’t going to add anything else, the woman says, “You’re grieving. When someone loses a person they love, they often grieve for years. You may n
ever get over her death, but you can learn to live with it.”

  “It’s been two years,” Ally says, wiping at her eyes.

  “You were best friends for almost six years.”

  “And I was in love with her.”

  “Exactly,” the therapist adds, her thumb picking at the cardboard cozy surrounding her paper coffee cup. “It isn’t unreasonable to think you’ll need at least that long to move on. Even that may not be enough.”

  Silence fills up the room again. Finally, Ally breaks it.

  “She died thinking I’d abandoned her,” Ally whispers, the tears spilling over her cheeks. “I was supposed to come, and I didn’t, and I never got to tell her why, and then she was dead.”

  “Misplaced guilt is dangerous and it impedes progress.”

  Ally falls back against the sofa and covers her eyes with the heels of her hands.

  “You just have to keep trying. There is no better way to honor her memory than to keep trying and do what you can to make the world better. We all live with regret. You can live with it.”

  But it doesn’t look like Ally can live with it. It looks like it’s tearing her apart.

  “Sometimes I wonder what it would be like to die the way she died. To know what she was feeling in those final moments.”

  The therapist stiffens. Ally doesn’t notice. Her eyes are still fixed on the ceiling.

  “She did it to end her pain. That much I understand,” Ally whispers. She laughs but it’s a sad, choked sound. “I completely understand.”

  I feel a hand on my waist. A cold, hard hand, and it pulls me backward.

  “No,” I say. I try to shrug off the hand, but it won’t let go. “No, I want to hear this.”

  But my will alone isn’t enough to keep me in the therapist’s office. I’m jerked away from its intimacy. Away from Ally. Away from the time and place where she struggles to survive.

  The scenery changes for a final time.

  I’m on a battlefield. It’s the smell of blood and ash that brings the scene into sharp focus. Embers rise into a blazing sky. The clouds are as red as blood, with liquid pink and orange bleeding out behind them.

  I can’t tell if the sun is rising or falling. Maybe both at once.

  Gabriel stands beside me in beautiful armor. He has a sword, black to the hilt with blood and smoldering. His hands and cheek are smudged with ash.

  “You’re going too far,” he says. “You’ll lose your way if you don’t go back.”

  I can’t speak. I’m choking on the smell of corpses. If I open my mouth, I’m sure I’ll vomit on myself. My stomach turns violently.

  “I thought Michael was doing this to me, showing me these things.”

  “No,” Gabriel says. “You’re doing this to yourself. And he’s letting you. He would know more of your heart.”

  My heart.

  “Let me lead you back,” he says, reaching for me.

  I don’t say anything. I try to remember who I am and how I came to be here. There is a name on my lips, a name I keep repeating over and over in my mind.

  But I can’t quite remember who it belongs to. Because the truth is, it’s not really her name either. It is only a location. A moniker for a finite segment of time, for a temporal being that flickers like a candle flame, with every threat of blowing out.

  “What is this place?” I whisper. I shift my foot and the body under me cracks. I look down and see a wing. A black wing as slick as oil, snapping like bird bones underfoot.

  “You believed us into reality,” Gabriel whispers. “You gave us names. You gave us powers. You declared that good shall triumph over evil. You think that everything happened before you came to be. But it was after. We walked from your dreams into this reality. And we can disappear into it as well. That is what Michael fears.”

  We created the angels? And God? With our stories and our beliefs…and if we forget you?

  I don’t know if I say it. But Gabriel nods his head.

  “He doesn’t believe the power of creation should be yours. That you should make us here one moment, and unmake us the next.”

  “And what am I in all this?” I whisper, looking at the rotting bodies at the edge of a city of glass. I can hear a sea, but can’t smell it over the corpses. The only salt I smell is what I see on sweating skin.

  Gabriel takes ahold of me.

  An army of beasts emerge from the ashy smog. Hooves or paws or claws pound the earth. Skulls are crushed underneath. Skeletons crack. A wall of howling forms keep coming until I can see their reptilian eyes. They’re almost upon me. I do not move. I watch them come. I want them to come and to overtake me.

  “Am I a destroyer or a creator?” I whisper.

  “Can’t you be both?” he asks and pulls me into the sky.

  I open my eyes. I’m on my back in the snow. The sky swirls blue around me.

  Jesse, Gabriel calls. He sounds as if he is calling from a great distance, his voice a mere whisper on the wind. Jesse.

  I can feel that other place calling me again. The gate with its sea, its salt and storm full of angels who want to tear the world apart. We all have visions…all have dreams, fighting to occupy this same space and time. Whose dreams should win while others die?

  I cling to it as Gabriel begs me to get up.

  But I’m so tired. I’ve never been so tired in my life.

  And all I see when I close my eyes is her blood on my hands. Her blood soaking into my clothes. Her blood drowning all thoughts from my mind like a relentless river whispering, your life is shit. Your life doesn’t mean anything. She is all that is good and kind and true in this world, and you let them take her away.

  “Was that the past or the future, Gabriel?” I ask. My lips feel chapped and swollen. “All the things I just saw…”

  A shadow passes overhead. Something black and great as one of those monsters from Gabriel’s battlefield. A bird large enough to blot out the sun.

  I can hear its thunderous, unforgiving wings.

  It’s come for me.

  “Was it the past or future?” I ask again. “Because I can no longer tell.”

  Chapter 17

  Ally

  “Get out! Everyone get out!” Gloria screams from her hospital bed. The monitor attached to her wrist wails until she yanks it off with one furious pull. The whole machine slams onto the floor.

  “Now settle down, Ms. Jackson,” Dr. Gray says. High color flushes her cheeks, and I can tell by the thin strain in her voice that she is on the verge of losing all her patience. If Gloria wasn’t so broken, crushed by a boulder in the desert the day Georgia escaped with Maisie, I don’t think she would have tolerated this much insolence. And there is the matter of Jeremiah’s obvious fondness for her.

  I never understood it. Did he feel akin to her because of the visions? Gloria wouldn’t call herself a prophet. She blames all of her ability—the drawing and the remote viewing—on the tortuous program that came from her time in the military. It was her successful transformation that made the military turn its attention on her brother. They assumed that genetics played a role in the body’s ability to adapt. So her brother was also recruited to undergo multiple procedures.

  I don’t think she ever forgave herself for that. And when Micah joined Caldwell, I think she blamed herself even more.

  Since Micah is dead now, killed by her own hands, she will have to live with that, too.

  “Please give Captain Jackson the privacy and peace she deserves,” Jeremiah says, fidgeting with the knot of his tie as if preparing for a date.

  They obey him without question, of course. Until it is only the three of us left and the remains of the buzzing machine that’s been dashed against the floor.

  “Get me paper, pens,” Gloria demands. I don’t know if she’s talking to me or him.

  “Alice, would you go to the service desk and tell Jan—”

  “No,” Gloria hisses. “You. Go and get them for me.”

  Jeremiah looks ready to protest.r />
  “Please,” she adds.

  He opens and closes his mouth twice with his own shade of high color bleeding in. I see sweat standing out on the back of his neck.

  “You just woke up,” he says patiently, once he fixes that horrible smile back on his face. “You’ve sustained many injuries. I’m not sure you even have the use of your hand.”

  She lifts her right hand three inches off the baby blue coverlet tucked in around her legs and flips him her middle finger. She keeps her eyes locked dead on his. “My hand is working well enough. Paper. Pens.”

  “There’s plenty in our sleeping pod, in our belongings.” This is true because I brought her belongings from the hospital. “I’ll go get it.”

  “No, he will,” she says, without taking her eyes off of him.

  When it is abundantly clear she will not say more until he leaves, Jeremiah gives in. “I’ll be back.” He casts me a severe look. “Try to keep her quiet, and restful. She will irreparably hurt herself if she tries to do anything strenuous before she’s ready.”

  “I am right here,” she says. “And last I checked, I still possess agency over my own body. If I want to throw the damn thing off a cliff, I will.”

  Jeremiah’s thin lips press together until they lose all their color. Then he is out of the room in a heavy stride, leather shoes slapping at the tile.

  “That man,” Gloria says, falling back against her pillow. Her eyes roll to the ceiling.

  “You’ve woken up in quite the mood,” I say, coming to sit on the end of her bed. “Of course, I don’t blame you. The last time we were under his command, he tried to keep Jesse in a medically-induced coma. Glad to see he hasn’t done the same to you.”

  “I’ve not been under any man’s command since I was discharged from the LDRVP in 2003.”

  I nod, accepting the correction. “Do you see something? Is that why you want to draw?”

  “Yes.”

  I never know what to say here, if it’s a matter of present or past tense. Does she see it in her mind now? Presently? Or did it come to her like a dream that she tries to remember? I’ve always been curious about it, about how she draws and what that experience must be like for her. But she’s never opened up to me about it.