Dying for a Living (A Jesse Sullivan Novel)

by Shrum, Kory M.

  “Your A.M.P.’s name and how long it took for her to complete your evaluation?” Ally asked.

  “Cooper something. Gildroy, Godfrey, or…,” he said. His eyes glanced down, unfocused. “I only remember the doctor called early the following week and asked me to come back in to discuss my options.”

  Cooper Gooding. We only had one death-replacement agent named Cooper in Nashville.

  “How did you feel when you first learned the news?”

  He leaned back in his chair, running his thick hands through his hair. “You mean, when the doctor informed me some psychic—sorry, A.M.P.—said I was going to die? I didn’t believe it at first. It’s not the conversation one professional has with another.”

  Ally kept scrawling on the page, nodding. “When the doctor informed you of the analyst’s results, did he make your options clear?”

  He scratched his chin. “Either I took my chances and hoped the day passed without incident or I took precautions. I’d say my choice was pretty clear.”

  “Was it a difficult decision?” Ally asked, looking up from the page.

  “Not really,” he answered. “I get the money back if nothing happens. If it does, I’d say my life is worth more than a mere $50,000.”

  “That’s right,” Ally said. I’d also have to return the $50,000 fee if I screwed up and he died. I could die myself and still wouldn’t even get to keep my 20% cut. Since he’d be dead, I guess that didn’t matter to him.

  She reached the last question. “Would you recommend death-replacement to a family member or friend?”

  “Ask me that one at the end of the day,” he replied. “Once I see what happens.”

  Ally was packing up but I had one more question. “What do you do here?” I swept the grandeur of his office with my eyes.

  “I’m a marketing and media consultant,” he said. “We do advertising for local businesses, night clubs, and popular consumer products.”

  I bet he was one of our very own PR guys. Otherwise, I wasn’t quite sure why Brinkley put his file in my bin. Not that Brinkley would tell me if I asked. Boss Brinkley only showed interest in telling me what to do.

  When the secretary went home at 5:00 P.M., I decided to play in her desk to ward off sleepiness. I’d been working seventeen hours straight. In addition to an impressive array of writing utensils, the secretary’s desk had several pictures of her kids and a coffee cup that said, “Procrastinate and you tempt fate!” A real go-getter this one. I played with her label maker, placing labels that read “Zombie touched this. Eek!” on everything: her chair, her cup, her computer. I spared the kids’ pictures.

  I was about to turn on the internet when the computer popped then fizzled out. Was that smoke? Shit. I put my head on the desk. It was not the first time this week, month even, that I’d had something short out on me. It was like I short-circuited electronics by my touch alone.

  It was a brand new problem that I could do without.

  I didn’t even have time to come up with an excuse for exploding the secretary’s computer when a familiar sinking sensation washed over me. My grip tightened on the edge of the desk.

  “Ally,” I said, calling her name as loud as I could manage with a tightening throat and nausea. I wanted her to know it was almost time. I looked up through the floor to see Mr. Reynolds freeze mid-motion. Ally spoke to him, but too softly for me to hear.

  My vision blurred in and out of focus, making it difficult to see exactly what he was doing as the fading light in the room intensified. It’s like being really, really drunk except I’ve got all my wits about me. This disorientation was normal—bizarre but normal—, unlike this new failing electronics problem.

  I recognized Reynolds’s movements as hesitation. Clients often freeze up when I start to react. No one wants to die. To the clients, in this moment just before it happens, it seems as if any movement could be the wrong one. He stared at me through the glass floor.

  Sensing death was like a panic attack. I tried to breathe against the pressure in my chest. Nothing was actually wrong with me, except that I knew what was coming, or at least some part of me knew, and that part of me panicked. My limbs flooded with adrenaline and were ready for anything. Here in this bright office, it seemed unlikely I was going to get hit by a bus, stabbed, or suffer any bodily harm, right?

  Wrong.

  I closed my eyes and tried to quell this sick feeling. Before I opened them again, something heavy came crashing right through the desk, knocking me backwards out of the chair. I hit the back of my head on the window-wall with a thump and my ears rang on impact. Splintered glass from the crushed secretary’s desk sprayed like water into my face. I tried to shield myself with my hand and swore like crazy.

  “Who designs this shit!” I pulled a large shard out of my left forearm. It had gone straight through the skin. Blood spurted out of the wound and my jeans were ruined. Again.

  Ally came down the stairs as fast as she could without falling herself. She only took the steps one at a time, carefully holding onto the rail. Good girl. I wasn’t equipped to deal with two people dying at once. Death-replacement is a one-on-one exchange.

  “Mr. Reynolds?” It took me a moment to realize it was his body that had fallen on top of me, lying now in the mess of the secretary’s shattered desk. I kicked a chunk of desk off of me and I pulled myself out from under him, dragging my burning arm through broken glass.

  “Mr. Reynolds, can you hear me?” I checked his pulse and it was faint, slowing.

  I opened his suit jacket and pressed my hands to his chest for a pulse as Ally’s voice echoed through the room. She gave the address and situation to the emergency operators on the phone. The tiny glass shards in my arms and legs burned like hell as they worked their way in deeper into my skin. I saved the freaking out until after she hung up.

  “What the hell did you say to him? We don’t do suicides.” I was talking too fast. OK, so having a body drop on me unexpectedly had caught me off guard. At least I couldn’t be blamed for the broken computer now. “And what the hell is it with fat men falling on me? That’s two this week! I’m like one hundred and twenty pounds, assholes.”

  It became a race to see who could speak the fastest with the widest eyes.

  “I didn’t make him jump, thank you. I told him when you get pale like this it means it’s about to happen. So instead of paying attention to his own two feet, he watched you. He tripped on the laptop cord and rolled right over that damn rail.” She pointed up, looking freaked too.

  “You have to stop telling them they’re about to die,” I said. I leaned close to his ear and practically shouted, “And you have to get wooden desks.”

  As if reacting to the thunder of my own voice, my vision gave over completely, switching from dizzying spottiness to full-blown waves of color.

  “Finally,” I said, relieved. “Do you see it?”

  “You ask me this every time,” Ally said. “The answer is still no.”

  The room was a shifting aurora borealis of heat and light and a comfort to see. Even weird shit can be comforting, when you expect it.

  “Everything is light,” I explained for the millionth time because I really wished she could just see it for herself. “Nothing is solid. It’s kind of like those thermal readings.”

  “Jesse, he isn’t looking so good.”

  I focused on the man still partially in my lap. He was no longer a warm red-orange tinged with yellow like Ally. He was green now, edging his way into the dormant blue-gray I saw in so many other things like the floor, the desk, and walls. It was my job to keep the blue from overtaking him.

  I can’t explain what I do exactly.

  Death is the transformation of energy. I admit I’m guessing here. I did know that when someone was about to die, a tiny black hole was created inside them. Like a black hole in space, it looked like an empty swirling vortex. This vortex was what sucked all the warm, living colors out of a person, leaving nothing behind that could survive.


  My job as a replacement agent was to convince the fleeting red of Mr. Reynolds, so ready to burn up its little flame and become a dormant blue that it really didn’t want to go into that swirling vortex drain after all. Somehow I did this by willing it.

  My colors have never matched Ally’s, Brinkley’s, or anyone who’d accompanied me in the room during a replacement. Lane too, I imagine, would be a more vibrant hue if I ever got a good look at him. The point was I seemed a welcome home for blue flame since I was always blue flame. Not the cold blue of furniture or buildings, more like a sparkly blue. Electric blue.

  With Reynolds’s flame drawn into my own, it gave his red-warm fire room enough to burn. But there was a special spark I was looking for, something I had to find inside him and keep from being washed down the swirling vortex.

  The elevator opening and Ally shouting to the paramedics seemed like sounds underwater, distant and muffled as I focused harder on Reynolds.

  “Hurry, Jesse,” she said, so soft she could have been whispering.

  A hot-cold chill settled into the muscles in my back and coiled around my navel like an invisible snake as I pushed my own flame further into Reynolds. I slid through him with urgency, aware I was running out of time.

  There—a spark where our flames danced around each other. Against the line showing the division, I pushed hard. Reynolds’s chest rose suddenly, jerking as he gasped, like gasoline thrown on the blaze.

  But even though I scooped Reynolds’s precious spark out of the vortex, the vortex didn’t just close. Somebody still had to go through that death drain. Unfortunately, that somebody had to be me.

  So I exhaled one last breath and gave myself completely to the waiting darkness.

  Chapter 2

  I recognized the ornate tile above Kirk’s head: soft, creamy swirls and the smell of carnations. We were at Mt. Olivet’s funeral home in the preparation room where Kirk always fixed me up. When death spits me back out the other side, I’m far from pretty. Worse, I always come off rigor mortis the way an addict comes off a high—nauseated, woozy, and hateful toward the world.

  “Be still,” his voice commanded.

  My mortician Kirk was well over six feet tall, bald, and his skin the color of pure cocoa beans. His square frame loomed over me, casting a long dark shadow as I lay stretched out on one of those doctor examination beds, plush with a slight incline.

  Kirk’s face was a mask of intention, while a thin applicator brush jutted at my eye from one hand. He was an artist with a canvas. Who was I to interrupt? I adjusted my neck to its original position and closed my eyes again. His soft brush moved over my closed eyelids, lips, then down each cheek. His light touch relaxed me.

  “That smells good,” I said, trying not to fidget despite the pain in my back.

  “Organic Rosemary Tint,” he replied. “It will compensate for your pale complexion until your circulation improves.”

  Real dead people don’t care about their cosmetics. However, with developing Necronite-mortician relationships, a whole line of organic cosmetics for customers like me had spawned. Let’s just say that no amount of Maybelline would make me look okay after a replacement. Though I have a really fast metabolism and some regeneration-healing skills, I still need help putting parts of me back together. This was also why I needed Kirk. Unlike any doctor, he was used to working with stiffs, so I could trust him to fix me up at any stage of decomposition, no matter the damage my body took in a replacement. The hospital was responsible for making sure all my organs, etc. were accounted for—and Kirk was responsible for the rest.

  “Did you see anything strange?” I asked.

  He paused, the brush hovering over my bottom lip. “Your heart beating in my hands is strange.”

  “No, I mean anything unusual,” I said. “Anything you don’t usually see?”

  He considered my question then returned to painting my face. “No. Why?”

  I thought about the strange electrical problems I’d had lately: coffee makers, light bulbs and then the secretary’s computer, all exploding on their own. That wasn’t normal for me and something about it scared me a little—the way missing my period or losing a wallet scared me—not the mishap itself so much as the possibility of greater mayhem.

  “I was just wondering if you found any brain-eating slugs. Got to watch out for those.”

  “No, nothing like that,” Kirk said with a warm grin and the snap of a latex glove. “All finished.”

  Kirk packed up his black case, arranging the box of gloves, varied brushes and cosmetics just so. He pulled off the other glove with a second snap and threw it in the waste bin. The fact that I could turn my head at all said I wasn’t “zombie-shuffle” sore. I asked Kirk about it.

  He turned his wrist over to read his watch. “You’ve been alive for almost four hours.”

  That explained why the rigor mortis wasn’t so bad. My cells would’ve had time to push some of the calcium out and lessen the muscle contraction, but the only cure for rigor mortis was a hot bath, massage, lots of gentle stretching and most importantly, time.

  “What was my D.T.?” I meant “down-time” or “death-time.” Necronites stay dead—no heartbeats, no breathing, actual decomposition and all that—until our brains reboot. Then we experience the coma state, in this case, the four-hour stint Kirk mentioned, while our bodies heal enough to support themselves and regain consciousness. Scientific minds are politely calling this whole process NRD, or Necronitic Regenerative Disorder. No hocus pocus here, folks!

  Kirk looked at the ceiling as if calculating in his head. “About fifteen hours. We’re coming up on 8:00 A.M.”

  “Tuesday?”

  “That’s the one.”

  I loved it when that happened, when I slept through the night and woke up at a normal hour. It made the death-life transition easier.

  “Where’s Ally?”

  He wiped the bristles of a dirty makeup brush clean with a towel. “Gone since she delivered your body last night. Brinkley’s here to take you home.”

  I fell against the bed and faked a coma.

  “That shit won’t work on me,” a familiar voice said and I didn’t feel the least bit compelled to quit playing dead. I’d rather be dead than deal with Brinkley any day.

  “Get up.”

  I groaned and dragged myself from Kirk’s table. My legs instantly stiffened as they hit the floor. Groaning, I stretched each limb before rolling my eyes up to meet Brinkley’s.

  “Have I ever told you how much fun you are?” I asked.

  “More than once.” Brinkley was just a tad shorter than Kirk with the same wide shoulders and early signs of a beer gut, bodies like old football stars. I thought they knew each other from past military days and that’s why Brinkley set him up as my mortician when we relocated from St. Louis. Whatever his past, Brinkley was more like a cop than a soldier now, given his work with FBRD—The Federal Bureau of Regenerative Deaths—but his graying hair and sour face said it all. He’d seen some things in the world that he hadn’t liked and he’d been dealing with them ever since.

  I often felt like I was one of those things.

  “Do you want to know something really funny?” he asked, entering the softly lit room. He was in jeans today and a collared T-shirt. Even when it was ninety degrees outside, I’d never seen him in anything but pants. I wonder if his legs were as pasty white as the rest of him. “I just got another batch of your reviews.”

  Brinkley waved a thin stack of post-replacement survey cards at me before tossing them for me to catch. They were held together by a rubber band and their rough edges each sported a different color ink and handwriting.

  “My personal favorite and I quote,” he said, through tight lips. “Ms. Sullivan is like a human Chihuahua who barks at anything that moves.”

  “I don’t bark.” I flipped through the cards.

  “I believe it’s a comment on your constant sarcasm,” Brinkley said and slipped his hands into his pockets. “Not that any
of us have had the pleasure of experiencing it.”

  “My commentary is not constant,” I argued. I flicked the card. “That woman is just mad because I called her a hoarder. She had, like, two million creepy dolls.”

  Kirk grunted, suppressing a laugh. “What kind?”

  “Porcelain—and some of them clowns,” I answered and tried to get a crick out of my neck by stretching it long, left then right. My neck muscles ached like I’d spent the night head-banging. “If I really was a mean person I would’ve said something about that stain on your pants.”

  All of our eyes went to Brinkley’s crotch and the dark stain about four inches below his gun.

  I arched an eyebrow. “I could say—”

  Brinkley stopped me, ears bright red. “That—” He refused to look at his crotch, which resulted in his pointing at it. “—is your fault.”

  “I’d remember making you piss blood.”

  His tone turned dangerously even. “When we picked you up from the hospital, they missed a piece of glass. When I pulled it out, you squirted on me,” he said, jaw still tight. “It would seem even your corpse is a sarcastic little shit.”

  Kirk, whose eyes had merely gone back and forth between us as we argued, gave a polite cough.

  “If you’ll excuse me,” Kirk said, squeezing my shoulder. Kirk and Brinkley did a male nod thing before it was just Brinkley and I left standing in the back room. We’ve worked together for the last seven years, yet I still found being alone with him awkward. Maybe awkward wasn’t the right word—uncomfortable.

  “I’m scared to even ask how it went with Mr. Reynolds,” he asked, relaxing his shoulders a little. “I hope you gave him a nice impression of Necronites. We pay him to make you look good.”

  “I saved his life,” I said. “If that even counts.”

  “That’s only part of the job.”

  “The hard part,” I mumbled. “The part I don’t even get thanked for.”