Dead on Arrival

by Crystal Lynn Hilbert

  This time, it took him a minute to turn out his pockets for the bastard corpse’s last fiver. But when he had all his change collected and tallied, he bought the whole half pizza the vendor had left. Cheese, salted and tangy with a spice that bit back, delicious crispy pepperoni.

  Max just finished the crust off his last slice as he climbed the fire escape up the side of his flat. Wiping the grease off on his coat, he crouched down to peer through the window. The living room sat in the kind of half dark that came from street lights, but he could see a light on in the kitchen, yellow spilling out onto the hall carpet and twining up into the light from the bathroom. Cautiously, he tapped on the glass.

  Charlie emerged from the bathroom and squinted at the door, half glowering. Max grinned, tapped on the glass again, delighted to see her, to be solid and visible and undeniably exist. But when she turned, looked at the window and found him there, her face went to Voodoo Charlie in a flat second.

  “Is Mason still here?” he asked when she threw open the window. His voice sounded strange coming out of this bloke’s mouth, deeper and slurred, like his tongue couldn’t manage to form a proper word. “I feel filthy.”

  Charlie backed away, breathing like she had to concentrate really hard on not stopping. Max frowned and he climbed in, easing the window shut behind him.

  “Do I smell that bad?”

  “You stole a body,” she said, her lips frightfully gray.

  “Yeah, well. He was a jackass. And!—and so would you be if I’d not popped along.” He rocked on his heels, balance drifting. “Dead, I mean.”

  “Max.”

  “Charlie.”

  She kept on staring at him, worse than toilet tissue, worse than a stray dog, worse than worse, and a really awful feeling started creeping through Max’s belly that had nothing to do with all he’d eaten.

  “You stole a body,” she said. “I mean, thank you, for biting the bullet for me and all, but Jesus Christ.”

  Max tried a grin for her. “No, look, it’s all right,” he started, reaching to put a hand out on her shoulder like he’d done pretty much every time they talked for the last year. But Charlie jerked back, hard and violent, shaking her head.

  “Max, this is not all right.”

  Max stared at her with the darkened couch between them, feeling for the first time like a stranger in his own flat.

  “Well, what the hell would you rather, darling?” he snapped. “Should I have let him have a go at you? Did you want to be shot or raped or robbed? Did you?”

  “Mason—”

  “Mason’s a useless fuck, Charlie. He didn’t save you and he’s not here now. So what do you want from me?”

  “Goddammit, Max. I didn’t need saving. I had my fucking knife.”

  “You may have had your fucking knife, but he had his fucking gun. Knives and gunfights, Charlie. You’d have gotten killed.”

  “I’d manage. And this—this is not about me. I did not evict a man from his own damn body and then go puppeting his corpse all over town. Shit, Max, where did you go? You’re covered in ketchup and that had better be chocolate. I don’t even know what to begin to do with you.”

  “Well, maybe that’s the thing, yeah? Maybe you don’t need to do a damn thing with me. How about you take the passenger seat once in a while? Let someone move through this world without you telling ‘em where to go.”

  Charlie went cold and very still. The streetlights outside hit her face and she looked… bad. Gray. Worse than she had with a gun pointed between her eyes because those eyes were fixed on him, her hands clenched into stones. “What exactly are you implying?”

  But Max couldn’t back down. He’d climbed the whole mountain and here he was looking over the edge. Nothing to do but take the fucking jump.

  “Where’s Mason?” he asked. “I bet he wanted to stay with you, just so you’d sleep easier. He’s that kind of guy.”

  “He is that kind of guy, but I sent him home. I don’t need a fucking babysitter.”

  “Yes, my point exactly. Charlie, you sent him home. You told him where to go and he went.”

  “Oh, so he should have stayed the night? Just so he could wake up with his pants digging into him sideways, smelling like beer and yesterday, because some jackass popped out and demanded my purse?”

  “Maybe he wanted to!” Max shouted. Charlie recoiled like he’d hit her, jaw clenched and wary. Gentler, he went on. “Maybe there are people in this godforsaken world who want to take care of you, Charlie. Maybe you don’t have to sort everything out by yourself.”

  She ran a hand over her face, pushing the flyaway tendrils of lost hair away from her eyes and sank down onto the couch. She didn’t say anything. Max sat down beside her after a while. Their shoulders nearly touching, they stared into the dark together.

  “Is that what you’re going to do?” she asked finally. “Steal this guy’s body and sort everything out for me? He could have warrants. Hell, he could have family.”

  “Yeah. But, if it all works out, I could… we could…”

  “Steal somebody’s life?” She glanced up sideways and amended, “He deserved what he got. I’d have stabbed the bastard’s eyes out given a chance. See how he liked being blind in prison. But this… this is wrong.”

  “Doesn’t have to be. Charlie, look.” He grinned and thumped his chest. “Solid.”

  “So, what? You take the thirty, forty years he’s got left and live out the life you never got to finish? You’ll be lying, Max. Every fucking day will be a brand new lie. It’ll always be somebody else’s life—somebody else’s body.”

  “Finders keepers. I’m in it. It’s me. I ate today. Hamburgers, pizza—nothing memorable about it, but it was fucking fantastic. Later, I suspect I will take a dump, and that too will be fucking fantastic.”

  “And you’ll still be dead,” she cut in, frowning at him, and it wasn’t at all like jumping, it was like the cliff crumbling away under him. “You’re still a dead man, only now you’re in a dead body. It doesn’t change anything. It’s not living; it’s borrowing.”

  Max took a deep breath and put his head in his hands, elbows propped on his knees. He rubbed unfamiliar eyes, closed against an unfamiliar headache and Charlie was right.

  Whatever that fucker had been on, the body was coming down off it now whether he wanted it to or not, and it wasn’t his high, and even suffering, it wouldn’t be his hangover. Wouldn’t be his withdrawal or his track marks. Wouldn’t be his bad record that kept him unemployed. Wouldn’t be his assault with a deadly weapon that got him locked up for years and years.

  Charlie was right. She sat there, face like heartbreak, looking at him and seeing her mugger but still looking for him, and it wasn’t fair or okay or even good enough, but Charlie was right.

  “Fine,” he said and heaved his corpse up, off the couch. “What do we do?”

  *

  Max hated the water. But with Charlie sitting on the edge of the pier, the moon on her face, her eyes on him, he felt better. As better as drowning could feel anyway.

  He waded out into the river, stony bed crumbling under his heels. A boat went past. The water shoved at his shoulders, took his balance and dropped him under. Max swore around a mouthful of water. He’d had gentler bar fights than this and he wanted back out, he wanted to go to bed in a warm body, with Charlie up against his side, but he knew better.

  And that was a hell of a thing. Sometime between dying and stealing a new body, he’d bloody well grown up and Max didn’t like it at all.

  Morals. Responsibilities. He’d never liked them well in life either, but just look here. Now they had him wading into the damn filthy river, off to die a second time, and wasn’t that just the truth of it?

  The water closed overhead, the bay floor dropping out underneath of him. Panic seared him raw, his borrowed lungs burning for air, knowing better than to breathe, but breathing anyway. Max’s chest started filling with water, swelling up, heaving in buckets of river, which actually…


  Felt okay. Lightheaded and strange and he still couldn’t breathe, but he felt cool on the inside. Like hot summers with lovely blue pools, beautiful girls in tiny string bikinis sunbathing in the sorry, waterlogged mess of his body.

  Max left the body there and waded out. He stood next to Charlie on the pier, watching the abandoned corpse sink. Max felt sick—no, felt cheated. And that was worse. Charlie glanced his way and held out a hand, her face so carefully neutral it looked like it might shatter at any second. He took it anyway. His fingers passed right through her skin, but she didn’t flinch and that was enough.

  The body got caught on a wave from a passing boat, blue face hitting the surface for a second, catching the moon.

  They stood there, holding hands. Watching the water.

  “I just wanted to be real for you,” Max said. “Here, you know? I hate being a damn shadow.”

  “I like shadows.” Charlie smiled and his heart broke. “Very unobtrusive, shadows.”

  “I don’t want to be unobtrusive. I was never unobtrusive. I was a right brawler, me.”

  “And you’d still be engaged to that slut muffin after your memaw’s rings.”

  “What? Oh no. Naw. She dumped me.”

  Charlie looked sideways at him, one eyebrow raised. “You said ex, I thought you meant ex because you died. Why’d she come back to peek in all my vents?”

  Max shrugged. “I bought her a ring. Thought it’d mean more than one I had just lying about, yeah? Well, she said it showed a lack of commitment on my part and that until I knew if I wanted to be married, she’d be fucking about with other blokes.”

  Charlie kept watching him, even as always, and she still had her fingers twined as best they could manage in his.

  “Did you want to be married?” she asked.

  With her eyes on him, Max didn’t feel like a shadow. He felt lost, cold and naked, but visible. Here.

  He squeezed her hand, watching the corpse kiss the tide. “No.”

  They stood. When the corpse stopped coming up, when the last little bubbles flecking the corners of his lips popped and he sank, they went back to the car. They didn’t talk. After disposing of a body together, they didn’t really have to. Charlie just looked at him, all hunched and pathetic in the passenger’s seat—without any anchor in the world save Charlie, and losing her too, probably.

  They didn’t go home. They drove.

  For miles through night time city traffic, Charlie drove. With the clubs sneezing people onto the pavements in drunken wobbly clots, the Strip still mostly open anywhere that fried food or sold beer, bad music and teeth rattling beats pounding up from the other cars picking through cockeyed pedestrians right beside them, cheek against the glass watching the kind of people nobody ever saw out in the day, freaks arm in arm with snow cones and black smiles.

  Max watched, not feeling much of anything. Just tired, waterlogged. Feeling the river.

  And still, Charlie drove. She drove all through the city, through the nice bits he’d never had a reason to see, with half million dollar houses that’d have gone for a fiver back home; drove through a park and up half a mountain. And when she ran out of places to drive, she stopped up on a scenic overlook.

  Max looked over the city for a half second, and then back to the car park around them, empty but for a pair of dead kids snogging. He watched them going at it, not really looking, but not really looking away either, burning up with envy and… and scared.

  Coward, she’d called him. Holy shit, was he. Sitting here, watching a pair of kids who’d died doing something really stupid, probably. Or hell, maybe that side of the cliff had just caved in on them and sent them down the hillside, still locked at the face, and he wanted that. Because he was a terrified, lonely bastard and he’d done everything else by himself but he couldn’t do this, too.

  Max felt the world slipping sideways on him. Any minute now, he’d spill out the cracks like too much jam on a sandwich, forgotten and unnoticed, like jam always was until it went and brought the ants in, but Charlie…

  Coward, she’d called him. Hip half stuck inside the gearbox, Max spanned the distance and kissed her.

  Charlie didn’t move. She didn’t pull away, but she didn’t lean in, either. Didn’t cuddle up into him or drag him by his collar into the backseat. Didn’t run her fingers through his hair. Somehow, even being kissed, she managed not to touch him at all.

  Just looked at him, all sad eyes and pity and there wasn’t a damn thing she could have said would have hurt him more than that look.

  Quietly, “Max.”

  He sank back into the passenger seat and scowled out the windscreen at the city.

  “Fuck it. I know.”

  *

  Things certainly didn’t go uphill after that. Any little thing had them fighting fit to bring the ceiling down. A bad night? A funny look? They argued. Mason coming around? They argued. Mason not coming around? They argued.

  Max felt trapped. Stuck. Couldn’t go forward—no lights, no grand spiral staircase, not even a helpful sign saying you are here, now bugger off elsewhere. And he sure as hell couldn’t go back, as Charlie was kind enough to remind him every second of the goddamn day, never mind he’d gotten that body by saving her life. Gift from fate, that should have been. But then, Max decided as he trailed after Charlie, shouting his head off, fate was a right bitch.

  “So what, he’s just going to be there now? Whenever he feels like?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Bollocks. You’ve got the bloke by the short hairs, just like everybody else you run into.”

  Charlie stormed across campus, cutting sideways through a large swath of green. “I’m letting him do what he wants. Like you said, remember? Because I can’t let anyone do anything on their own? Yeah, I decided to change that. Or isn’t that okay with you?”

  And close on her heels, Max followed. “Oh, so you’re just going to change everything about you to suit this bloke?”

  “This bloke, this bloke,” she snarled, mimicking. “Mason. His name is fucking Mason.”

  “All right, then. Is fucking Mason going to be fucking you sideways over my death stain every night or what?”

  “Your death stain. I can’t even believe you!”

  “You could at least have the decency to do it elsewhere. Especially since you’re so deathly terrified I’ll watch.”

  “You did, Maxwell. You fucking did.”

  “I bloody well did not. I was in the loo smashing my head in again, thanks very much. Not everything I do revolves around you.”

  “You,” she hissed and spun, grinding a fishtail in the mud as she turned to glower through him. “You follow me everywhere. Point in case—you followed me to class.”

  He stared her right back, grinning with teeth. “You’re talking to air, sweetheart. Everyone thinks you’ve gone mad.”

  Her eyes narrowed. Dangerous, yes, but she didn’t have anything of metal on her here—no switchblades on campus—and there wasn’t much she could do with a rock or stray tree branch to bother him. And anyway, Max almost wished she would. Have a good row, pitching things, fighting, clawing—the works. He wanted to feel something, anything. Wanted her to look at him and see him, not this sideways glancing, ignoring thing she’d be on, fucking Mason every night for the past eternity and—

  And there she went, again. Charlie just turned and walked away, a muscle still going in her jaw, but otherwise perfectly ignoring him and fuck that. The time for timidity had bloody well passed.

  “Is he moving in, then?” Max pressed, striding to keep up with her. “You gave him a key, so I assume he’ll be there all the time. You know he’s crazy for you, yeah? Soon he’ll be down on his bad knee, asking you to pop out his babies on your student loans and hardware-shop salary.”

  She kept staring straight ahead, ducking into the alley between the last two campus buildings. “Shut up.”

  “Will you name one after me?” he kept on. “A little Max to go with your Ma
sons and Charlies? Or will you just settle with a Mason Junior?”

  Charlie glowered like a meteor headed straight for his head. “What is your fucking problem?”

  “I love you!” he shouted, wanting to shake her, wanting to crawl somewhere behind her spine and live there forever. “Does he?”

  “Maybe.”

  “Maybe?”

  “Maybe, all right?” She grabbed her bag and jerked it back steady on her shoulder, knuckles white around the strap, pointedly not looking at him as she stormed out of the alley. “Does it fucking matter?”

  Already glaring at the light, Charlie stopped at the side of the street. Just a block away from her flat and how dare it happen to be green when she needed to cross? For that matter, how dare it fucking exist? Max hated that look. Detested it irrationally with every fiber he didn’t have in his being.

  “Yeah, it matters,” he snarled, coming up beside her. “You gave this bloke a key to our flat. He can just waltz into your life any damn time he wants and you don’t even know what you want.”

  The light went red. Across the street, the little blue walking man flickered awake. Charlie strode off the pavement, head down like a bull.

  “I want to be normal,” she snarled, and a truck flew around the corner, straight over the center line.

  “Charlie!” he shouted.

  But the thing had to be doing somewhere close to eighty on this wet, shitty city street and neither one could move fast enough. It hit Max head on and barreled right through—left him in just the same place when it barreled past.

  But Charlie hit the bonnet and flew. She arced through the air, slammed like a rag doll into the side of a parked car, and hit the cement in a pile of hurt and bad angles.

  Her middle fingers deployed on enraged instinct, eyes flying open a quarter second later. “The light was red, you piece of shit! Red!”

  She wasn’t dead, Max thought blindly, rushing to her side. Not yet, anyway, propping herself up on the side of a parked car and trying to stand, spitting blood and cursing the drunken fuck and all those who’d had any part in spawning him down to the deepest, slimiest corner of hell.

  “Charlie. Shit, Charlie—sit the fuck down! Where’s your phone?”

  “My phone?” She glanced around, addled. When it didn’t call out her name and do a jig, she shrugged, giving it up. “Hell if I know. You see that bastard?”