We thought maybe space-time had become corrupted.
We thought maybe the universe’s OS had crashed.
But we didn’t know the cause. We knew only one thing.
They fared no better than us.
We all Go
INTO THE NIGHT ALONE
I found the ghost in the cemetery downtown, or what was left of downtown, anyway. He was just standing there at the foot of the grave, staring at the white chrysanthemum on the freshly turned earth. Or maybe he was staring at something else. It was hard to say what ghosts really saw.
There were white chrysanthemums on all the graves. I didn’t know who was bothering to put them there. The cemetery staff were long gone judging by the weeds and the garbage scattered throughout the place. No one had bothered to move the little golf cart that had crashed into one of the trees near the gate months ago. I didn’t think anyone was coming back here, not unless they were dead already.
The ghost, whose name was Michael Thane, didn’t seem to notice all the burning buildings in the city’s skyline. It didn’t mean anything, though. Most of us had gotten used to the fires and wreckage since Judgment Day, or whatever you wanted to call it. There were fewer alarms and sirens now, but there were enough that they must have masked my approach. Thane didn’t look up from the grave until I was nearly upon him.
He tried to run, because that’s what ghosts always do when they see me. I don’t wear a uniform or a badge or anything else like some of the others do, but the ghosts know I’m a ferryman before I even say anything. Maybe it’s the way I carry myself. Or maybe it’s the gun in my hand.
I looked at the grave marker as I went past and saw Thane’s name inscribed on it in a simple script, and just the dates of his life. It wasn’t exactly a premium stone, either. I’d been expecting more, maybe a statue or a line of poetry or two. His wife, Cassandra, was an artist but unlike most artists she wasn’t short on money. Maybe she was a minimalist. Or maybe she thought there was no point in getting elaborate with a grave marker. Who was going to see it now, after all? Just Thane and me and whoever left the flowers.
I wasn’t surprised to find Thane at his own grave. I was expecting it, in fact. The cemeteries are always the first place I look when I get a call about a ghost. The dead that come back, they can never really believe they’re dead. Maybe that’s why they return in the first place. They usually go to the cemeteries to check out their own graves, like that somehow makes it real. What would you do if you were a ghost?
I chased Thane through the rows of the dead, each of them with their single white flower. I wasn’t sure what to expect from him, because every ghost is different once they come back. Sometimes they go right through the grave markers and the cemetery fences and whatever else they want. Sometimes they turn invisible and try to hide. Sometimes they try to put their hands into your chest and grab your heart. No two ghosts are alike. They’re not even really like their living selves. They’re just strange echoes of who they once were.
But Thane ran like a normal man, so I chased him down like a normal man. I tackled him among the graves and he was solid enough I could have believed he was alive if his file hadn’t told me different. When he tried to throw a punch up at me from the ground, I hit him across the forehead with the barrel of the gun. He curled up and wept for a bit, and that was that. I stood and waited for him to finish. We were in no hurry, after all.
The sun was setting by the time he got back to his feet, and we stood there for a moment and watched the sky turn red. I held the gun at my side and didn’t bother threatening him with it. I knew he wasn’t going to run again and so did he. We walked back to his grave as the day faded into night and I saw the chrysanthemum had been kicked off by one of us. I nudged it back on with my foot. It was stained from the earth now. So it goes.
“You’re not supposed to be here,” I said.
“None of us are supposed to be here,” he said. He looked at the burning buildings, which were like torches in the sky now. The lights of something flashed high overhead. A plane, maybe, or just a drone. Maybe something else. It was hard to say. “Or didn’t you get the memo?”
“I didn’t get mine yet,” I said. “But I got yours.”
“The ferryman come to take me to the land of the dead.”
“Somebody has to do it.” Because that was my job. Escorting the dead back to death, so they didn’t run around loose in the world of the living and cause problems. More problems than we’d already caused, anyway. It wasn’t a job for everyone, but I had a way with the dead.
“And what if you didn’t take me back?” he asked.
“If I had a dollar for every time I’d heard that, I could retire and let someone else argue with the dead.”
He came along to my car willingly, but I kept my gun ready, just in case. You never know how these things are going to play out, and the dead always have their own ideas about things.
I got in behind the wheel and Thane got in the passenger seat beside me. Most times the ghosts get in the back, but it doesn’t really matter where they sit. It’s like that old saying: it’s the journey that matters.
We drove away from the cemetery and toward the shattered skyline. Darkness didn’t exactly fall because all the fires lit up the night, but it was as close as we could get these days. I steered the car around some wrecked vehicles and a couple of bodies that hadn’t been picked up by the cleaners yet. We passed a grocery truck going in the opposite direction. The driver lifted a hand off the wheel in greeting and I did the same. It was like driving through some idyllic place in the country instead of the ruins of the city. Thane looked out the window and shook his head.
“You may as well get comfortable,” I said. “It’ll probably take a while.”
“What did you do before?” he asked, not looking any more relaxed. I couldn’t blame him. How do you get relaxed about death? Even I didn’t have the answer to that.
“Before what?” I said.
“Before Judgment Day.”
“Does it matter?”
“I don’t know,” he said. “It must matter to someone.”
“Maybe it does, but not to me.”
We came across a semi on its side, halfway in a Starbucks. It blocked the way so I took us down a side street where there was a dead horse lying on the sidewalk, with a patio umbrella sticking out of its body. It wasn’t the strangest thing I’d seen. It wasn’t even close.
“Where are we going?” Thane asked. “Or are we even going anywhere?”
“We’re just driving,” I said.
“Just a couple of guys driving through the night,” he said, looking back out his window, as we passed a row of cars that for some reason all had crushed roofs, as if something had fallen from the sky and onto them.
“For now. Eventually I’ll look over and you won’t be there anymore. Then it will just be me driving through the night.”
“And where exactly will I be?”
“I don’t know,” I said, which was more or less the truth. “We all go into the night alone.”
But if it had happened like that, I wouldn’t be telling you this story now.
“What if I said it doesn’t have to be like this?” Thane asked. “What if I actually gave you someplace to drive?”
“I’d say I’ve heard it all before,” I said.
“I have money stashed away. A lot of it.”
“How much is a lot?”
“If you have to ask,” he said and laughed.
I kept driving nowhere and waited for him to tell me more.
“I just want to live a little while longer,” he said.
“Why’s that?” I asked. “It’s not like the quality of life is better these days.”
“I don’t know what’s waiting for me on the other side.”
“Who does?”
“I like to think there’s someone who knows. That might make all this bearable.”
I had to slow down to drive through a roadblock in the financia
l district. Three cop cars sat empty in a line across the street, their doors open and the lights on their roofs flashing. The bank towers looming above us were burned out already. It was like we were in the ashes of some great blaze.
“You want to see Cassandra again,” I said.
“You seem to know all about me.” He looked up at the darkened buildings and shook his head. “What a waste.”
“It’s all in the file.”
“Who gave you the file?” he asked.
“Someone who’s good with files,” I said. We’d all discovered all our special talents after Judgment Day. Some people had learned they were good at surviving. Others had discovered they had the files suddenly and mysteriously in their heads. Others realized they were ghosts. We were all little miracles in a world that didn’t care. I’d found out I was a natural ferryman. No one really knows why you need a ferryman to escort the ghosts back to death. It’s just one of those things that happened after Judgment Day. Like the universe had said enough and started making rules, even if those rules didn’t make much sense.
“Is how I died in the file?” Thane asked.
Sometimes the dead honestly didn’t know. A truck hit them from behind or an overpass collapsed on them or whatever. They came back not even knowing they were dead, let alone what had killed them. But Thane’s death was memorable, and I knew he wouldn’t be forgetting it anytime soon.
“Timothy Burn killed you,” I said. “He shot you in the side with a handgun. And then did those other things. In your office just after Judgment Day. When everyone thought the world was actually going to end.”
“But it didn’t end,” Thane said, still looking at the towers. “It never does.”
“Security cameras caught the whole thing.” I hadn’t seen the video, but August had. She was the recorder I normally worked with. She’d described it to me in a Starbucks that was somehow still open.
“A guy in a blue uniform comes into Thane’s office,” she’d said, staring over my shoulder as we sat at the table, listening to the café’s jazz. “Stains on the uniform from I don’t know what. Timothy Burn, that’s his name. Bald with a goatee. No family. Gun in his right hand. Doesn’t look like Thane recognizes him. Thane starts reaching for the phone but Burn shoots him in the right side. Thane gets his hand on the phone but can’t pick it up. Burn waits for him to bleed out enough that he’s weak. Then he pulls him out of the chair and drags him over to the wall. He goes into the other room and comes back with a screw gun. He lifts up Thane and stretches his right arm out. He screws Thane’s hand into the wall. Does the same with the left. Leaves Thane there crucified to the wall.”
It wasn’t necessarily the sort of death you expected, but it didn’t come as any surprise in these days, either. Everyone had their own take on Judgment Day. I’d paid for the coffee and hadn’t said anything else to August.
“Maybe there will be a trial someday, when everything gets cleaned up,” I told Thane.
“And I’ll still be dead,” he said.
“Why did he kill you?” I asked. It wasn’t in the file. Maybe it was in Burn’s file, but that didn’t matter to me because I didn’t have it and he wasn’t dead yet.
Thane shook his head. “I don’t even know who he was. I guess he worked at the company, because he had the uniform. Maybe he wanted something he didn’t have. A raise or better hours or a different parking space. Maybe he didn’t like management. Maybe he was just mad because I didn’t remember him. We didn’t exactly talk about it beforehand.”
Or maybe he’d wanted Cassandra. Although he didn’t really strike me as her type. I figured she was more into the rich-and-dead set.
“I’m not going to help you get revenge on Burn,” I told Thane. “That’s not what I do. He’ll be dead one day soon enough. The two of you can work it out then.”
“It’s all yours,” Thane said, and I knew we were talking about the money again. “You just have to let me go.”
“You can’t stay a ghost forever. Someone else like me will track you down.”
“It won’t be your problem, though, will it?” Thane said, turning to me. “It will be theirs.”
“How much money?” I asked again.
“All of it,” he said.
I looked at the empty cop cars in the rear-view and thought about what I could do for Emily with that money.
“What’s the address?”
* * *
THANE DIRECTED me to a condo tower along the new transit line. The tracks were buckled in places and a train sat frozen on a journey to nowhere, its windows all blown out. The tower looked like it had been untouched by Judgment Day, though. Maybe that was what money could buy you.
We left the car in the street and I didn’t bother to lock it. We hadn’t seen another living human being since the truck driver who had waved at me. Most of the survivors had fled into the country after Judgment Day. I doubted it was any better there, but I wasn’t planning on visiting to find out. Not as long as I had Emily to look after.
The glass walls of the building’s lobby were somehow still intact but the doors were locked. I stepped aside and let Thane punch in the code on the keypad. I wondered how long he would be able to keep physical form. It was different with every ghost. Some were fading even as they came back, but others stayed a long time if they had the motivation. Thane looked pretty physical. I wondered about his motivation.
We got in an elevator and Thane pushed the button for the penthouse. It scanned his finger and thought about it for a second, and then we rose up like the world hadn’t ended.
“This place isn’t in your file,” I said as we went. Thane owned a half-dozen properties around the city, but there weren’t any notes about this one.
“It’s owned by a company,” Thane said, looking at his reflection in the elevator wall. “And I own the company that owns the company.”
I thought maybe it was a place he kept for sex with men or women, or maybe to take his drugs, until the elevator opened and we stepped into the penthouse. Everything was white – the walls, the furniture, the appliances, the rugs on the white tiles. Even the paintings that hung wherever there weren’t windows were sculpted layers of white paint. There wasn’t a bit of colour in the whole place beyond us.
“This is like a shrine or something,” I said.
“It’s where I come to think about what I’ve done,” Thane said, looking around. “And what I need to do.”
When I looked through the windows, I could see everywhere. It looked like the entire city was still on fire. So I tried not to look out the windows again.
“Cassandra make all these paintings?” I asked.
“In a manner of speaking,” he said, looking around the room. “She works in many different mediums.”
It wasn’t exactly an answer, but I didn’t push him on it because I thought it was all the answer I was probably going to get.
“Where’s the money?” I asked.
Thane walked over to the nearest painting. “It’s underneath the canvas. There’s money inside all the paintings.”
He reached out to take the painting from the wall, but I waved him away with the gun. “I’ll do that part,” I said, because I didn’t know what was behind the canvas and he did.
He looked at me for a few seconds, his arms still outstretched toward the painting. Then he shrugged and stepped away.
“It’s your life,” he said.
I stepped past him and grabbed the painting by the top of the frame with my free hand. I pulled it from the wall and the world exploded in even more white and a sound I can’t describe, which left me unable to hear. I tried to grab hold of Thane so he couldn’t get away, but now I was lying on the floor near the entrance instead of standing by the wall, so all I could grab was air. The explosion had thrown me across the room.
I got up with all the ability of a small child and looked around in time to see Thane stepping through a glass door out onto the patio. He glanced back at me as I pointed the gun
in his direction. I couldn’t keep my hand steady enough to centre the sights on him, though.
Thane stepped up onto the railing and then walked off without even stopping. He didn’t fall, though. Instead, he just kind of drifted down out of sight as I stumbled forward. By the time I managed to get out onto the patio and look over the railing, he was disappearing into some smoke that had drifted down the street from a car fire at the end of the block. He didn’t look back at me and I didn’t bother with the gun. We both knew I couldn’t hit him from this distance.
I checked myself for injuries and found a messy red hole in my left side. Something had gone in there and not come back out. Blood oozed from the hole, but slow enough that I knew I had time left on this earth yet.
I went back inside the penthouse again and looked at the painting I had grabbed. There was a charred black hole in the centre of it, and I could see different-coloured wires and bits of red and blue plastic wrapping behind the canvas. The only colour in the place. The wall where it had hung was scorched black, too. The wall looked like an abstract painting now.
I had thought maybe Thane had been going for a weapon, but it had been some kind of trap. An art trap. There hadn’t been any money or any guns. There had only been a bomb set to take out the person who moved the painting. If I’d been a little less lucky, maybe I would have been the one standing around a cemetery next, looking at my grave and wondering what had happened.
I looked at the other paintings and wondered if they were all bombs, too. I suspected the whole place was probably a trap. Thane had played it like he didn’t have any special powers back in the cemetery, when he clearly could have escaped me there by floating away or through things. He’d brought me here just to try to get rid of me or at least leave me behind. He must have been planning for this moment when he was still alive. He knew a ferryman would come for him. And he’d planned all along to get rid of that ferryman so he could do whatever it was he’d returned to do.
I went back down to the car and I wasn’t surprised to find the tires all flattened. That was all right. I had a few surprises of my own.
Has The World Ended Yet? Page 4
