Hurry up and wait part 1 (of 3?)
Disclaimer: I own nothing.
Air embolisms are a very ineffective way to kill someone. You have to inject it into just the right spot and even then it's not one hundred percent. That's why my murder went for an exotic poison that would have made my death a certainty and been nearly untraceable. Being exotic, it was an easy matter to keep track of their spending and know exactly what was coming (what else could they be doing with so much fugu, and don't try and tell me it was just for sushi). I had the antidote prepared long before they even thought of how to deliver it. When the attack finally came, sloppy really, a 'surprise' attack after I'd been called to work late one night at the office, I was ready. Before my would-be assassin could even fully depress the plunger on the syringe of poison, I had his neck snapped between my hands. In the next minute I had the antitoxin coursing safely through my veins. I was just getting back down to the last of my paperwork when the heart attack hit. That idiot had been none too careful with the needle and injected me with a sizable air bubble along with his poison of choice. There wasn't much I could do at that point save die.
So I died.
That's really all there is to tell. Some asshole tried to kill me, failed so miserably it swung right back round to success. Life can suck that way.
That's how I got here, hanging out in a god damn grave yard waiting for what? A bright light? Pearly gates? A fiery pit to open up at my feet? I don't know just something, anything.
Death is boring. Very, very boring. I'm still here, on earth, watching people go about their dull everyday lives, only now I can't even talk to them. Not that I was much of a talker in life, but it's the principle of the thing. Even if I wasn't doing much with it while alive, at least I was still able to participate. Now I'm just an outside observer. I can't even rustle leaves or make ghostly rappings, so haunting my murderer is out. Not that I really wanted to spend my afterlife as some parlor trick spirit, but at least it would have been something.
Right now, I have nothing. I can watch the people or watch the clouds. The clouds are generally more interesting.
I've checked, it's not like I'm bound to the cemetery. I can go anywhere I want. I can even walk through walls. I tried visiting a few of my old haunts, if you will, the office, the club, the stock exchange. It's just not the same. I have no loved ones worth mentioning. No friends, no family, no one to mourn. Not that I would really want to spy on their mourning, but at least it would have occupied my time. I even considered trying to find a small child to communicate with, like in that one movie, but what would I do then? Give him legal advice and stock tips? No.
I've spent the last two days laying on top of my grave and looking at clouds. I never had the time to look at clouds while I was alive. I was too busy making money. I was a corporate lawyer, the best in the city. I always wanted to find my own enterprise and make it a financial powerhouse, but I never quite found the one.
And they say no one ever dies wishing they'd spent more time at the office.
I'm sorry to say I don't see prosaic fluffy white things in the clouds. Those clouds over there look like someone getting their face impaled on a phallic spike. And that one looks like an imposing cat sarcophagus. Those irregular ones over their look a lot like a skull with spikes sticking out. I make this last observation out loud, mostly just to hear the sound of my own voice. It's all the company I have these days.
"Hey- it kinda does. Brutal."
I sit up from my reclining position over my grave. There is this strange man, younger than me, grubby black t-shirt, long black hair. He must be here for a funeral.
I stare at him. He is still looking up at the sky. He can't possibly have heard me.
"It's like a boney, spiky sort of face," he continues. "Spikebones... boneface..."
What the hell is he talking about? Who on earth is he talking to? It can't be me. No one has been able to hear me in weeks, not since I died.
"Hmm, Facebones... It defiantly looks like a Facebones."
And then he looks right at me. Not through me, but at me. And smiles.
"Ah, can you see me?" Not my most eloquent moment, but I'm dead so shove it.
Now he looks concerned too.
"Wait, can you see me?"
There is mutual disbelief on both our faces. We speak at roughly the same time.
"Are you, dead?"
He nods. I nod.
Well then. I stand up and hold out my hand.
"Charles F. Offdensen. Pleasure to meet you." He looks at me like an escapee from the loony bin. Just because we are both dead, it's no reason to ignore societal convention.
After another awkward moment, he shakes my offered hand. "Nathan something Explosion."
I quirk an eyebrow as I drop his hand. "Something? I question.
He looks embarrassed. "I don't know, middle names are stupid. You don't use them, it's not my fault I don't know it. Middle names are for dildos."
Well then.
"So, you're ah, dead?" I know we have already established this but I can't help belaboring the point. It seems terribly important somehow.
"Yup." he agrees. "A couple of weeks now. You?"
"The same."
"I've seen you around, but I thought you were some kind of morbid hipster."
I look down at the tailored three piece suit I died in and am still wearing. "You thought I was a hipster? In this suit?"
"Aren't hipsters the ones that dress funny?"
I give him, Nathan, a more scrutinizing look.
"Well, you look like a reject from some kind of lame metal band."
He looks genuinely hurt.
"Dethklok's not lame! We're totally cool!"
More awkward silence.
"So," Nathan begins. "You ah, want to go grab a beer?"
I was never much of a beer drinker while living. More of a scotch man, I liked my spirits finely aged in oak caskets. But right about now I would sell my soul for a drink of any kind. You hear that Satan? All you have to do is show up here with a bottle of abc liquor and I'm yours forever.
We float into a pub, one of those fake Irish pubs Americans drink at to feel classy. Because association with a country most noted for its alcoholism will make you seem like less of a lush. In any case, it is near the cemetery. At mid day it is mostly empty so we have no trouble sliding into seats at the bar. It mystifies me that we can walk through walls but still manage to sit on bar stools. Shouldn't we fall straight to the floor? I don't know, ghost physics was not among the course offerings while at university.
Nathan tries to signal the bartender. As expected, there is no response. We are still dead after all. I'm starting to get the distinct impression that Nathan is not brightest bulb on the tree, crayon in the box, ant at the picnic.
"DUDE, BEER ME!" my companion is shouting now.
I let him make a fool of himself for a moment longer.
"You do remember that we're ah, dead, Nathan?"
He gives me the most comic look of bewilderment. Like a particularly dimwitted dog.
"Oh. Duh."
He moves on from trying to get the bartender's attention and tries to swipe a nearby pint. His hand goes right through the glass. Dear god, am I doomed to spend my afterlife with only a complete moron for company? I know I wasn't a good man in life, but I don't think I was sinful enough to warrant this sort of punishment.
"Dead, remember?" I pass my hand through an empty up turned glass to illustrate the point.
We sit there, morosely, in a darkened pub with fake authentic decor, stone cold sober. Being dead sucks.
We watch one of the grungy midday alcoholics down a pint in a single breath.
"So, how did you...?" I wave my hand in what I hope is an illustrative manner.
"Hmm?" he rips his eyes away from the now empty glass, a drop of dark amber liquid running enticingly down the side. "What? Oh. See there were these ninjas, about a hundred of them and a couple of pirates too, and they ganged up on me and this robot..."
I give him a cold, hard stare. He looks guiltily back at me.
"I uh, got drunk and choked on *mumble mumble*"
"You what?"
"I uh, choked on my own vomit."
It takes every last bit of self control not to burst out laughing. It's not even really that funny, but I might be becoming just the tiniest bit hysterical. I am talking to a dead man in a pub, I think it's understandable.
"Right," I fight back the hysteria with logic. "There wasn't anyone around to turn you on your side or call an ambulance?" That's alcoholism 101, never drink alone, never let your friends pass out on their backs.
"No, the guys were there, they were just drunk too."
There is another awkward moment before he turns to ask me the same question.
"Ah, an air embolism."
"AIR? You were killed by the air?" He starts to chuckle. I refrained from laughing at his stupid death, he could show me the same courtesy. "How do you die from air? It's like every everywhere, what, did you just not breathe until that moment?" He's mocking me. Jerk.
"Air embolism, you dolt. My assassin was trying to inject me with a toxin but screwed up and injected me with an air bubble instead."
He stops laughing and starts looking interested.
"You were murdered? Cool. What did you do?"
"I snapped his bloody neck."
"Brutal." Nathan looks contemplative. I have to swallow my snort of laughter. Wouldn't want him to strain his last remaining brain cell.
"Have you seen him again?"
"Who?"
"That guy you killed."
Now that is a genuinely good point. We died within minutes of each other at the same location.
"No I haven't."
He stares longingly at our friendly neighborhood alcoholic's fresh pint of beer.
"I've been thinking." I give him the benefit of the doubt and reserve judgment. "Before I met you it was just me but now there is you and ...where are all the other dead people?"
This is an excellent point.
"It's a big city," he continues. "People die all the time. So, where are they?"
I don't know. I shrug.
We both go back to starring longingly at other people's drinks.
We decide to stick together. He may have the IQ of a boiled turnip, but he's better than nothing. Our first order of business is to locate any other dead people.
Maybe it's the Stockholm syndrome talking but I'm starting to warm up to him. He's still an idiot, but he is slowly becoming my idiot. We've had a lot of time to talk while we look for other spirits. Mostly he tells me stories about his bandmates, people with improbable names like Pickles and Murderface. I particularly liked hearing about the time they tried to raise a wolf cub in the middle of the city and it mauled a cat burglar.
I haven't told him a thing about myself. I could tell him about the time I cleared the legal red tape to make room for a hostile corporate takeover and four hundred people lost their jobs and pensions, but as Nathan is the only halfway decent part about being dead, I'd rather not have him disgusted with me.
Mostly we talk about stupid stuff. Nathan seems to lack an internal flitter and he will just talk about anything that crosses his mind. He tells me that's how he used to write songs. I've never been a fan of metal but I wish I could have heard Dethklok play. They are(or were I guess, now that the lead singer is dead) not a very big band but the small fan base is fiercely loyal. I feel like I could have done great things with them, if only I'd known them while still alive.
"Maybe we're angels?"
It has been a week. We haven't found any other spirits. We wondered through all the cemeteries, checked the morgues and the funeral homes and came up with nothing. We even tried to catch someone in the act of dying. We hung around hospitals and nursing homes. This city has the largest cancer ward in the state, someone has to be terminal but everyone seems to be in remission. Clearly I shouldn't have been so generous with the cancer charities while alive. No good deed goes unpunished.
"Angels?" I question, staring out over the sleeping city. It's 3am and we are perched on top of a building looking out over the city, hoping someone will be stabbed in an alleyway beneath us. It's like the reverse lottery. The odds of it happening are very low and if you win instead of a million dollars, someone gets killed. We are hoping to get lucky tonight. We are such good people, clearly angel material.
"I don't know about you, but for the record, in life I was no angel."
He turns to look at me. Stutters and stops, starts again. "R-really? But you're uh, wearing a suit. I thought guys in suits didn't know how to have fun."
"It's not a question of fun, it's a question of ruthlessness. I did what it took to get the job done, and damn whoever stood in my way. I was the richest lawyer in the city and you don't get that way without breaking a few necks." Not that the money really mattered. Being dead, I could see that now.
Nathan seems to sense my foul mood. "Hey, I wasn't much of an angel either. I uh, drank too much and bad shit always found me. A truck crashed into my class room killing people 'cause I didn't want to give a speech."
"It was an accident. I'm sure you didn't mean for it to happen." I try to argue reasonably.
"When it uh, keeps happening it's no accident. Every time my band plays someone gets hurt. But we play anyway."
"We wouldn't have liked being angels anyway. All that helping people."
"Yeah, people suck. Screw them."
And we go back to waiting for someone to die.
-
Another week has gone by with no other deaths. People are still dying in the city, every now and then I manage to check the obits, but none of them near us. If someone is dying at Shadygrove retirement home we are staked out at Sunnydale. But, and now this is a secret, I really don't mind. While we are waiting for someone to get lucky, or unlucky as the case maybe, we've started to talk. He tells me more about his band and his quest to make everything 'metal'. Sometimes he sings some of his band's songs. He hums the musical bits and doodly-dos where the drums should go.
Right now, we are in an emergency room waiting area. According to the news, people die all the time waiting for emergency care. So far we have found the staff to be polite and efficient, if somewhat overworked. No one is dying on their watch. Really, we should have moved on but, Nathan is explaining to me about that one time they had to visit a doctor and Pickles convinced them all to drink bleach. In life I would have been horrified that anyone could be so stupid, but death has given me a sense of humor.
After the story we laps into comfortable silence and suddenly I realize, "I'm glad that I died."
"What?"
Oh, apparently I said that out loud. "I mean it. I'm glad I'm dead. I hated my life. It was one long and boring executive meeting with people I couldn't stand and none of it mattered. No one missed me, no one mourned me but now-" and I manage, just barely, to stop myself from saying something incurably stupid. "but now it's better." I finish lamely.
It probably doesn't matter that I stopped myself in time. He gives me a look, like he knows what I was going to say anyway. "Let's uh, check out the high school. Maybe one of the nerds will be fed up and start shooting people." He changes the subject. I appreciate his reluctance to talk about feelings. They are soft and swishy and totally not metal.
This thought makes me laugh and off we go, together, through the emergency room wall.
-
Statistically speaking, someone around us should have randomly dropped dead from a heart attack by now. We are sitting on the ledge of another tall building, looking down at the crowded street below. One of the advantages, amongst the many, many disadvantages, in being dead is unrestricted access to any place in the city. Between looking for the recently deceased we been exploring any restricted areas we can find. We've been through bank vaults and back rooms and even visited the teachers' lounge at that high school a few days ago. Nathan recently spent a full hour in the girl's locker room. I was understandably less than interested.
The tops of buildings are our favorite places. We can see the whole world from up here without having to worry about people walking through us. It seems like we spend all our time up here lately. We've both mastered the art of moving through walks and walking on air. It became an easy matter to just pick a building and float. We've since figured out that we can sit on the ledge because we believe we can sit on the ledge, not because it has any real substance to us. If we stop believing that the ledge will support us we can fall right through. It's weird not really being able to touch, or interact with things. When I feel anything at all it's more like the memory of that thing.
Nathan interrupts my thoughts. "I'm glad too." The last thing we'd talked about was some ugly old lady down below and her poor taste in shoes. I refuse to believe that Nathan is glad that she had such poor taste in foot wear, even if we did get a good laugh out of it. I turn to look at him but he continues without prompting. "I'm glad that you're uh, dead too. The afterlife would be fucking dull without you."
I know what he means. This would have been hell if I hadn't found him. I reach out to him and place my hand over his. Only, that's not a memory of what skin should feel like. It is skin. I can feel his hand and it's rough and callused and even a little bit warm. I can't push through it or force it incorporeal. It's a real, live hand.
He's shocked too and for a moment we just sit there, hands pressing together, not even really moving. Then he reaches a hand out to me and touches my face. That is no memory of sensation, if for no other reason than it's not a sensation I've felt before. He pulls my face close and I lean up to meet him. Our lips meet and I'm falling. The world is whipping by and the only thing that feels real is him. His lips, his hands, the sensation of his skin.
It occurs to me that this feeling of falling is not merely a literary device. In our distraction we've forgotten to believe that the floor will hold us. We've been falling through the layers of the apartment building. I concentrate on making the next floor real and we land, with a thump, in the middle of someone's living room. We are jumbled together in a heap on an ugly braided rug. There are doilies on the nearby arm chair. No people that we can see but the lights are on. Right now it wouldn't matter if there was a bible study going on in this room. They wouldn't be able to see us and we wouldn't be able to stop ourselves.
After weeks of not really touching anything I revel in the fabric of his shirt. Cotton, could do with a wash but still soft. I fist my hands in his shirt and rub my face on his sleeve. We must look like crazy people, but it feels incredible. Why did it take me so long to try this? He sits up and pushes me gently away to remove his shirt. I work on removing my own shirt but god damn, stupid buttons, I should have died in the nude. Once his shirt is off, stupid easy to remove t-shirt, he helps me with mine. I've done all but the last two buttons and he rips it off. Buttons go flying. Damn it, as far as I know that shirt will have to last me for the rest of eternity. But I can worry about that later.
For now he runs his hands through my chest hair and tries to touch all of me at once. It doesn't exactly work, but I'm not complaining. It's stupid and wonderful and almost makes dying worthwhile.
I whimper into the crook of his neck as he pulls my body down to cover his. Our chests touch and move against each other. It is burning hot and electric like lighting. I feel chills and heat and skin and a million other conflicting sensations I've forgotten I could feel. His big, strong hands slip under my pants to knead my ass and it's like nothing I've ever felt before.
There is a thump and a clatter and a gasp. We both stop dead in our tracks. That wasn't me and that wasn't him. Our heads turn at much the same time to other end of the living room. Nathan's hands are still down my pants, still tightly gripping my ass and it still feels fantastic. Across the room a little old lady has fallen to the floor. Her walker toppled on its side and her hand gripping her heart. As we watch her eyes glaze over and before we can even move apart, try to make ourselves presentable for the first spirit we will met, a shadow descends on the corpse. It has no form, no features and it touches the body the same way we would. With an illusory grip that doesn't actually affect the physical form.
It sucks her soul out, which is funny because I don't know what a soul looks like but I can tell it sucked it out. Then it looks up at us with a face we can't so much see as sense. We are still naked from the waist up, Nathan with his hands down my pants but no longer gripping like before. This thing, this faceless, formless, incorporeal thing, it smirks at us. And then it disappears.
