Yes, thought Caitlin, there definitely is something wrong with me. And she wondered if, in the entire world, there could possibly be a more mismatched couple than her and Theo.
In fact, there was.
While Petula Grabowski-Jones waited in rapt anticipation, Mitch Murló suppressed a sigh.
“Okay, here she comes,” Petula said. “Watch—this is gonna be good.”
This wasn’t Mitch’s idea of a good time, but he was willing to suspend judgment since it seemed to make Petula happy. And he wanted to keep her happy, because this was their first date that didn’t involve the blissful silence of a movie theater. It meant they had to acknowledge each other’s existence for an extended period of time, and actually converse. Such a thing is not easy. It had taken a while to settle on a nonmovie date that worked for both of them. She had nixed bowling as too lowbrow, and fine dining was inconceivable with Mitch, because, according to her, he had “the table manners of a lemur with brain damage.”
It was thinking about himself as a lemur that made Mitch suggest the zoo. Petula had accepted, but, like everything else she did, it was for her own unique reasons.
Mitch couldn’t quite say why he liked Petula. Maybe it was the charmingly irritating way she introduced herself to people (“It’s PETula like SPATula, not PeTULa like PeTUNia”). Or maybe it was the way she parted her hair and braided her pigtails with quaint, yet terrifying, mathematical precision, so that even their faintly lopsided nature was by design. Or maybe it was just because she liked him. Whatever the reason, they now held hands and sat at a table at the edge of the snack bar of the Colorado Springs Zoo, watching Earth’s highest mammal species—the kind not protected from Petula by the safety of cages.
“You remember how dark the reptile pavilion was, right?”
“Yeah…” Mitch said.
“And you see how bright the marble ground is right by the exit, right?”
“Yeah…” Mitch said.
“And you see that one single unexpected step, right?”
“Sure…” Mitch said.
Petula gestured with her hand, as if presenting him with some breathtaking vista. “Observe.”
The woman who had just exited the reptile pavilion was fast approaching the nearly invisible step.
“Uh…shouldn’t we warn her?” Mitch asked.
Petula burned him with a glare. “Is there something wrong with you?”
Blinded by the white marble, the hapless woman didn’t see the step, and never had a chance. And while some other people exiting the reptile pavilion had made mildly clumsy missteps, this woman took a headlong fall; a wipeout for the ages. Her purse flew from her hands, disgorging its contents across yards of white marble, until it looked like the aftermath of a plane crash.
The woman, now prostrate as if in some odd form of worship, was rushed by half a dozen people. They helped her to her feet and gathered whatever belongings were not already being carried away by pigeons.
“That was…intense,” Mitch said.
Petula leaned into him, in a very friendly sort of way. “Some moments are too special not to share.”
“I think we should help her, though. I mean, look at her.”
Even with the assistance of several bystanders, the woman seemed seriously disoriented.
Petula sighed in mild exasperation. “We can’t help her, because we didn’t help her.”
“Huh?”
Reluctantly, Petula reached into her purse. “I didn’t want to show you these, as they would spoil the surprise. But I suppose it’s better if you know.”
And then she presented Mitch with a series of black-and-white photographs of this exact spot. One was an image of the very scene before them, as if it had been taken two or three seconds earlier. Another was a shot of a man lying sprawled out in equal distress. And there was a third photo, of an entire family that had landed in a dog pile.
And all at once Mitch got it.
“The box camera.”
Petula nodded. “I came here yesterday, set the camera for twenty-four hours, and started snapping pictures. I’ve been here several times before to enjoy the epic spectacle of the human fail. But I never knew when the most spectacular falls would take place. Thanks to the camera, I can tell down to the minute. The second fall will occur at three seventeen. And this third one at three thirty-two. I’m really looking forward to seeing how the family ends up like this.”
Mitch was still having trouble wrapping his head around Tesla’s camera that took pictures of the future. “But if we know what’s going to happen, and we stop it—”
“We can’t stop it,” Petula pointed out. “The fact that we have a picture of it proves that it wasn’t stopped. And the fact that we’re not in the pictures helping these people proves that we won’t.”
“But we could.”
Petula balled her hands into fists. “There are no pictures of you and me catching falling people. Do I make myself clear?”
When Petula became adamant about something, Mitch knew there was nothing to do but let nature run its course without further argument.
Petula, however, did realize that it was in her best interest to control her temper. She had to remind herself that Mitch was an imbecile, but only in the way that all fourteen-year-old boys are imbeciles. She would help him outgrow it. A month ago Mitch Murló was barely on her radar. Funny how things change. She actually enjoyed her time with him, even when he made her angry. Especially when he made her angry. For in anger there is passion.
But then leave it to Mitch to spoil the moment.
“You know, you really should give Nick back that camera.”
The mention of Nick made her feel defensive, possessive, and emotionally violated all at once. How dare he bring up the boy she’d rather go out with?
“Why would I ever do that? He still blames me for Vince’s death. He hates me.”
Mitch shrugged. “Maybe if you gave him back the camera he wouldn’t hate you so much. Besides, Vince’s death wasn’t such a big deal, if you know what I mean.”
Petula had to admit that the idea of Nick Slate not hating her would be a giant step toward her wish being fulfilled. And besides, she had other reasons to get back in Nick’s good graces—reasons that had nothing to do with her feelings and all to do with the tiny Accelerati pin she wore secretly under the lapel of her blouse.
“I’ll consider it,” Petula told him, gently patting Mitch’s hand. Then she pointed to a man exiting the reptile pavilion, a man destined to meet the marble in a most glorious fashion.
Some relationships are made in heaven. Some are not. Take, for instance, the relationship between the sun and the moon. Now, there was a perfect union of heavenly bodies. The moon gave the earth tides, which in turn created beaches and breathtaking shorelines. Its phases helped early humans devise a calendar, and the occasional eclipse gave various civilizations cause for great theatrical events, such as human sacrifices and school closures.
But now an asteroid had come between them, and it was beginning to wreak a whole new brand of havoc. Because when a third party enters any relationship, there’s bound to be some friction. Or at least some magnetic and electrical upheaval.
The first indication of change was actually rather beautiful. The aurora borealis, also known as the northern lights, which had previously been visible only near the Arctic Circle, could now be seen from any location on Earth. Sweeping flames of magnetic energy made a glorious display each night.
In every community, people would watch and marvel at the mystery of creation. And in the morning, when they received little carpet shocks while opening their bedroom doors, no one thought anything of it. At first.
Vince LaRue was no stranger to electrical shocks. Lately, his life was all about maintaining a firm electrical charge.
Death, he had found, was not all it was cracked up to be. In fact, it was a royal pain in the neck. Well, actually a pain just beneath Vince’s neck, where the electrodes were attached.
“Vince, honey,” his mother called from the annoyingly cheery part of the house, “are you still down there? You’ll be late for school!”
“At this point, does it really matter?”
His friend Nick had his bedroom in an attic. Vince had chosen a basement. Both were dingy spaces, but there was a fundamental gloom about a basement that Vince had always found appealing. Especially now that he was dead.
Well, not exactly dead. Undead. Not in the vampiric sense. Not quite in the zombific sense either, but in a real-world I’m-plugged-into-a-freaking-battery-that-keeps-me-alive kind of sense.
He regarded himself in his bathroom mirror, which had given him mostly bad news for the past couple of weeks. After all, he had been verifiably dead for nearly four days before his friends came to reanimate him—a moment Vince never wanted to revisit. He still couldn’t think of Spam or camels without feeling ill.
When he was first reanimated he just looked…well, dead. Pale and pasty like a fish belly. Unhealthy in a rare and special sort of way.
After a few days, though, his upper layers of skin had begun to peel. He was barely recognizable at first. He looked marvelously monsterlike. Just for fun he would go out in the early evening to parks and various other public locales to frighten the squeamish. His greatest victory had been making a young woman puke into her boyfriend’s lap as they sat on a bench in Acacia Park. Of course, it could have been the boyfriend’s kiss that made her barf—he wasn’t all that good-looking—but Vince chose to take credit.
“The dead skin will be replaced by living skin eventually,” Nick had told him.
“How would you know?” Vince asked. After all, it wasn’t like there was a manual for this sort of thing.
But apparently Nick was right. His skin was clearing up, and now he looked like he’d just gotten a really bad sunburn. Although his body temperature remained a tepid seventy-two degrees, he was beginning to resemble his old self.
The biggest problem with being undead, however, was that it left a person with truly unholy body odor. And so, before donning his Grateful Dead T-shirt—which was now satisfyingly appropos—he slathered his pits with industrial-strength Right Guard, followed by a chaser of Old Spice, and then some Axe finishing spray over the rest of his body. It would, for at least a few hours, reduce his personal stench. Of course, anyone near him might wonder where on earth that smell of cat food was coming from. It wouldn’t become intolerable until at least noon.
Vince had long since figured out the body-odor thing. It wasn’t only that his body was purging itself of the remnants of death. Tesla’s wet-cell battery had revived more than just him—it was also reanimating the dead bacteria on his body, all of which were more than happy to multiply and produce oodles of waste now that they were alive again.
What made it worse was that he couldn’t shower with the electrodes on the back of his neck. The little EKG pads and tape would get wet, peel off, and he’d die again—which had already happened once. There are few things more humiliating than coming back to life on the shower floor and finding your mother standing over you, having just reattached your electrodes.
Now he had to take careful baths several times a day. For a kid who used to enjoy stewing in his own juices, he had to admit that three baths a day was poetically just punishment.
“Vincent!” his mom called, with a standard parental loss of patience.
“Coming, Mom,” he announced as he trudged up the stairs.
His mother emerged from the unnaturally merry kitchen and entered the unnaturally merry living room.
“Sit down,” she said merrily. “Let me freshen up your tape.”
This ritual had been added to her routine good-bye hug, and Vince was as powerless to resist it as he was the hug. Mothers do what mothers do.
Carefully, making sure the electrodes never lost contact, she removed the old tape and checked that the electrodes were secure and the EKG pads still adhered to his skin. Then she put a fresh strip of tape on his upper back, just beneath his collar line.
She hummed to herself as she did it. Vince was still amazed by how quickly she had come to accept his living-dead status. Then again, what choice did she have? It was either accept it or run away screaming. She now called Vince her “little miracle” and left it at that.
In the days after his reanimation, she kept asking him what he had experienced in his temporary afterlife. Each time he answered in a different but equally snarky way. First he told her, “They gave me wings and I played Halo.” Then, “I inherited a planet, but it was blown up by the Death Star.” And finally, “I was at a dinner party with our dead relatives. That’s how I knew I was in hell.” She didn’t ask him again after that.
But the truth was, he couldn’t actually remember what he had experienced on the other side. It was like that dream that lurks at the edge of your consciousness, but you just can’t pull it from the depths of your memory no matter how hard you try.
As Vince walked to school, his head and shoulders in a habitual slouch, his mother followed one block behind in her car. She would track him until he was on school property, then leave to begin her work day at SmileMax Realty, which claimed to be the “Happiest Realtors on Earth.®” Ever since he had been resurrected, she wanted to drive him everywhere, to make sure he was safe. He had refused to allow it. This was their compromise.
As he strolled the root-buckled sidewalks of his neighborhood, he dared to consider his options. What were the long-term prospects for the undead? Would he grow into manhood, or would he be perpetually fixed at fourteen? If the latter, was that such a bad thing? And did being undead mean “living” forever?
On the positive side, his acne had cleared up, because acne, being the purging of dead bacteria, couldn’t happen if the bacteria kept coming back to life.
On the downside, if he were exposed to a bad bug it would multiply much more rapidly in him than in a regular living person. He could be the carrier of any number of deadly diseases.
Which was disturbing enough to be slightly thrilling to him.
With everything taken into account, Vince concluded that he enjoyed his current state of undeaditude.
He did have to admit that he missed dreaming. But there was no sleeping for him anymore. He had only two states now: awake and dead. Since he had previously been something of an insomniac, he was used to watching old movies and playing video games all night long. Since he never nodded off now—and never even got tired—he didn’t miss the end of movies.
His mother had once suggested that he disconnect at bedtime, and she could come in to reconnect him when his alarm went off, because “everybody needs eight hours of rest.” But when he pointed out that he’d spend those eight hours decomposing, it quickly put an end to that idea.
On the rare occasion when a wire slipped off in a public place, Vince had learned the trick of closing his eyes the moment he felt death coming on. That way, when he hit the floor, it would appear to any onlookers that he was merely unconscious until help arrived.
For this reason, Vince, a loner by nature, had been forced to adopt the buddy system, making sure that he was almost always under the watchful eyes of either his mother one block behind, or one of the four classmates who knew about the battery.
Mitch was the first member of their little secret society to greet Vince at school that day, at which point his mother sped away.
“Hey, Vince,” Mitch said, a little too loudly, like always. “How you feeling today?”
“Dead to the world,” Vince responded in as flat a tone as he could muster.
Mitch gave him a courtesy laugh, and followed him to class.
Between Mitch, Petula, Caitlin, and Nick, Vince had someone to spot him in five out of six classes. Though he hated having to be babysat, the possibility of dropping dead in the classroom was worse. Which, on this particular day, happened in English, when his backpack containing the heavy wet-cell battery slipped from his chair to the floor, disconnecting his elect
rodes.
Nick was two seats away when he heard the telltale thud of Vince’s head hitting the desk. It brought about a titter of giggles around him, because his classmates thought he had fallen asleep.
The cover story, which came in the form of a note from Vince’s mother to all of his teachers, was that Vince had been diagnosed as narcoleptic. The note said he could fall asleep at any moment, and that the teachers should not take it personally—which, invariably, they did—and, in fact, a few students were keeping a secret tally of which of Vince’s teachers were the most sleep-inducing.
When Vince went down, Nick was quick to react, practically jumping over the girl between them to reconnect the electrodes. Luckily, the wires had detached from the battery and not Vince’s back, because it would have been much harder for Nick to explain why he was reaching up Vince’s shirt to wake him, rather than just slapping him in the face—as many of the other kids, and perhaps even some teachers, would have been happy to do.
Once the electrodes were reconnected, Vince opened his eyes and popped up in his chair as if it had never happened. “Present!” he said.
The girl next to Vince looked at Nick with an odd expression on her face.
“What did you just do?” she asked.
Nick shrugged. “Nothing. I was just going for his phone to call his mother. She wants to know whenever he has a narcoleptic episode.”
But the girl wasn’t convinced. “What’s that in his backpack? It looks heavy.”
Nick and Vince were saved by their teacher, who insisted that all attention return to her. One of these days, though, Nick knew someone would get a little too curious and realize that Vince’s condition was grave—in the literal sense.
At the end of the period Vince made a beeline for the door, but Nick followed him down the hall.
“If you’re expecting a thank-you,” said Vince, “you’re not going to get one.”
“Why would I expect that?” Nick asked. “You never thanked Caitlin and me for reanimating you in the first place. And after what happened in the mortuary that day, we don’t deserve thank-yous, we deserve medals.” Nick shuddered. “I’m still having nightmares about porcupines and pickaxes.”
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