Deadsville

by C. L. Bevill

  Ma shouldn’t have let me read all those Dean Koontz books when I was growing up.

  There were others who were bloody and mangled. One man had his entire head inside a shark’s mouth. The shark’s tail flipped every once in a while. The man could be heard saying, “Why do I have to spend the rest of my time here with the stupid shark?”

  There were still others who didn’t look like anything was wrong with them. They wore clothing, sometimes period clothing, and played various games on the sidewalks and in the streets. A group of people argued over the best way to play hopscotch. Several of the people looked like they were straight out of the 1940s. One man had a WWII Army uniform on. A woman with a poodle skirt twirled so that everyone could see her granny underwear.

  Another woman wore a flapper outfit, complete with sparkling headband with a feather sticking out of it and a sequined dress with spaghetti straps and long fringe dangling on the bottom. She turned toward Tavie and Tavie saw a butcher’s knife sticking out of her chest. The poodle skirt said to the flapper, “Esther, your knife is showing, dear.”

  Esther glanced down, waved a hand, and the knife vanished. “I always forget when we’re discussing rules of a new game.” She rucked up her dress and removed a slender flask from the garter belt at her thigh. With a happy smile, she inclined it toward the poodle skirt. “Ecto juice, Doris?”

  “Don’t mind if I do,” Doris said. She took the flask and caught Tavie staring. “Look, Esther, it’s one of those she-males from the nineties or is the ought’s? Check out the jacket. That’s an Ann Taylor.”

  Tavie would have looked at herself, but she knew it wasn’t going to do any good. She knew what she looked like. With two older brothers, she’d had to keep up, and she wasn’t exactly the kind to back down. “This the way to the…elders?” she asked.

  Doris pointed the direction with the flask. “Must be new.”

  “How do you know it’s an Ann Taylor?” Tavie couldn’t help but asking.

  Doris shrugged. “Lots of Ann Taylors come through. The jacket is the first thing they trade. That and wedding rings.”

  Tavie nodded even though she didn’t feel particularly agreeable. She took a few steps in the direction Doris had indicated, “Hey,” Esther said cheerfully, “in case no one else says it, welcome to Deadsville!”

  ​Chapter 2

  The dead and the absent have no friends. – Spanish Proverb

  ~

  “Who wants a piece of this?” - Octavia Stone

  ~

  “You died. You’re dead. You’re here. Here you will stay until something else happens,” the man said to Tavie. It was a matter-of-fact tone and droned as if he had said it a thousand times and would likely say it a thousand more. The man looked like a cross between Howard Stern and Albert Einstein. His hair was a wild shaggy mane that he flicked over his shoulder with an impatient hand. His eyes were shaded by a bush of heavy eyebrows that had never shaken hands with a set of tweezers. Sitting on a stool made from battered 2x4s, he adjusted his button-down shirt and crossed his khaki covered legs, showing his Oxford dress shoes. His attention was only marginally on Tavie as he played with a large gold crucifix hanging from his neck. There was also a saint’s medal hanging there, but she wasn’t sure which saint it was.

  Tavie could understand that. There was a group of people all around here asking the welcoming committee same questions as she was. “Where am I? What happened to me? What is this place?” The people ran the gamut in estimations of their deaths. One man had a samurai sword sticking through his head a la Steve Martin and the arrow. However, it wasn’t an arrow and Tavie couldn’t see the plastic part that was supposed to hang over the top of the head. Another man dripped with water that came from nowhere and held a life preserver clasped to his chest that clearly hadn’t worked for him. The ship’s name on the preserver was the Costa Concordia. A woman held the end of the rope that looped around her neck in a perfect hangman’s knot, clutching it as if was the last bits of her sanity. Her face was black and swollen and her eyes completely shot through with burst blood vessels.

  “But I didn’t think I would really die,” the woman with the rope whined to another member of the committee. Her voice was high-pitched and carried over the murmuring crowd.

  The welcoming committee of the downtown was actually a group of men and women who patiently, if not warmly, answered most of the questions of the obviously new ones who had made their way to the center of the community.

  Tavie glanced around and took a look at the world. Glass lanterns of all types hung on building walls and were mounted on poles. Bluish lights came from the insides of the lanterns, flickering essences that seemed to burn from within without emitting any smoke. The meager lights revealed the environment at large and made it seem all the more bizarre.

  The ground was a mix of cobblestone and dirt. The few trees in the fewer patches of open earth were stunted things with black bark and blacker leaves. The buildings were half-assed constructions that appeared to be held together with bubble gum and packing tape. It was only a half-step up from where she had woken up with Happy Arnold the might-have-been-trying-to-steal-her-wallet clown.

  There was commerce here. Road side stands held people hawking their wares. Ecto juice was popular, whatever that was. One woman was calling out that she had used clothing and a dozen watches that might still work. Another one advertised a “hot” game of Buffalo Stud poker. Another man yelled that he had a case of Twinkies, fresh from the real world, and only “smushed a tad.” “Quick!” the Twinkie man enticed, “before the company goes belly up again!”

  As she contemplated her new surroundings, Tavie realized at some point in time she had come to the conclusion that she wasn’t drugged and she wasn’t psychotic, or at least any more than the next person. The reasons for her change of heart were both simple and complicated. It might have been the decapitated man carrying his head under his arm while the head held a conversation with a skeleton with only marginal bits of flesh remaining. Ray Harryhausen would have been thrilled to death. Tavie resisted the urge to stick her fingers through the ribs to see what would happen. The decapitated head caught her stare and winked at her lasciviously.

  “Do I get to talk to someone else?” Tavie finally asked the man who looked like Stern/Einstein.

  Sternstein finally settled his eyebrow heavy gaze upon her, as if she had suddenly become interesting. “Like whom?”

  Tavie pointed up.

  Sternstein glanced up. The sky was still gray and starless. The bluish lights didn’t show anything else of interest. “You mean…Him?”

  “I’d like a few answers,” Tavie said.

  “So would I, sister.”

  “You mean, I died, and not only that, but I don’t know how I died, and no one knows what happens next?”

  Sternstein nodded. “It’s a bitch, ain’t it?”

  “Life’s a bitch and then you die,” Tavie said instantly.

  “And death’s a bitch, too,” Sternstein added promptly. “I’ve never known a deadie to put it together so quickly.”

  “We’re all deadies?”

  “We’re not livies.” Sternstein chuckled.

  “Any way back?”

  “Not that I know of.”

  “Do we stay here forever?”

  “No. Eventually everyone seems to move on. There are a few holdouts, however.”

  “I saw a flapper,” Tavie commented. “If she’s really from circa 1920s, that’s almost a century right there.”

  “For you, anyway. I know a sergeant from the Civil War,” Sternstein said. “He’s still pissed off about the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and that happened almost a century after he died. You can guess what side he was on.”

  Tavie stared. “Do you know how you died?”

  “My second wife poisoned me for the insurance money,” Sternstein said. “I shouldn’t have married someone so much younger than I was. She was built like a brick house.” He sighed reminiscently.


  “Seems like a lot of violent deaths around here,” Tavie said. It was sort of a professional interest. “The flapper had a butcher’s knife in her chest and then she made it vanish.” Tavie snapped her fingers to demonstrate how quickly.

  “Deadies learn how to do that,” Sternstein said. “A little bit of power goes a long way. Some folks can change their looks, their clothes, even the size of their boobs. I know quite a few who don’t want to go around looking the way they did when they died.” An image of the man with the flattened head popped into her head.

  “So if the flapper died because she was stabbed, that’s the way she looks here,” Tavie said. She looked down at herself. “I don’t have anything strange on me, do I? Something like a wound that shows how I died?”

  Sternstein indicated that Tavie twirl around by rotating his index finger. Tavie complied. “Nope. I don’t see anything obvious. But then you don’t remember, do you?”

  “I don’t.”

  Sternstein steepled his fingers together. “That doesn’t happen very often. Most deadies remember everything and they talk about it ad nauseam. Maybe it’s because you don’t remember that you’re looking…untouched. Could be you’ll remember later. Interesting.”

  “Shouldn’t I be in heaven?” the rope woman asked loudly. “I paid my taxes on time every year! April 14th! I never got in a ten-items-or-less with more than ten items. That means even duplicates like twenty cans of cat food! I mow my mother’s yard regularly! Who’s going to do that now?”

  Tavie glanced over her shoulder. The group meandered and moved. People chatted with each other and a few obviously were going to be more than friends. “No fire. No brimstone. I guess we’re not in hell.”

  “The last time I saw a thermometer, it was a standard 75 degrees here,” Sternstein said. “You wouldn’t believe how that thermometer got here.”

  “And no angels playing harps, either,” Tavie said.

  “Oh, these esoteric conversations,” Sternstein said, clearly becoming bored with Tavie again.

  “Purgatory,” Tavie concluded. “We’re in Purgatory.”

  “If you believe in that sort of thing,” Sternstein said. “I always thought it was a logistics problem. The population boomed. In 1 AD there was probably around 300 million people on the entire Earth. Then in 1000 AD it was close to the same. But oh, the industrial revolution started the pitter-patter explosion. It was close to one billion in 1800 AD. That’s now six billion little bitty humans running around Earth at the end of the 20th century. Can you imagine how many people must die in a single day? Or in a single hour?”

  “That’s a lot of deadies,” Tavie commented dryly.

  “You’re pretty calm about this,” Sternstein said, motioning at the rope woman. She was screaming at the skies. She had fallen onto her knees and was threatening the powers that be with all of her verbal might.

  “Screaming isn’t going to do a lot of good,” Tavie said. “Sore throat and all.”

  Sternstein nodded. “Off you go.” He made a shooing motion at Tavie and she had a strong temptation to lean over and bite his fingers. “They say if you’re good here, you might go to heaven and all that. If that’s what you believe in.”

  “You said that twice.”

  Sternstein shrugged. “There’s lots of different beliefs here. Christians, Buddhists, Muslims, Hindis, and the lot. There’s one group down by the south end who practices worshiping a statue of John Lennon. They sing about twenty covers of Lennon songs. “Imagine” and “Starting Over” are my favs. They think that Paul McCartney is the anti-Christ. Who knows? Maybe they’re right and the rest of us are wrong.”

  “Go out and do what? Where do I sleep? What do I do for money?”

  “We don’t have to eat,” Sternstein said gently. “We don’t have to sleep. It doesn’t rain here. It doesn’t snow. Most of the time people won’t hurt you, although you have to be careful of some of the darker folks. And I don’t mean skin color by that remark. Don’t give anything away unless you’re sure you don’t want it. And you might not want to get into the ecto juice unless you really want to forget stuff.” Then he deliberately turned away from her and beckoned the next person in line toward him.

  Tavie stepped away because she wasn’t going to get anymore answers from him.

  * * *

  Knowledge was power. It was one of the first lessons Tavie had learned after she had graduated from the academy. Her mentor had been a grizzled old bear named Charlie Solomon. She could still hear his cigarette husky voice saying, “The more you know, the better off you are and these people you’re working with, they ain’t your besties. They’ll have your back most of the time, but kiddo, learn all you can while you can, and that’s the best way to CYA. Cover your ass.”

  Charlie would be the one to call Tavie’s parents. They lived in Prescott, Arizona, and they probably wouldn’t turn on the television in the morning. Maybe one of her brothers would, though. They would hear about it quickly. They might even call down to the station. She didn’t have to worry about her sister because Tessa was working in Germany at the moment.

  Charlie might even remember to come by and take care of Tavie’s two dogs. That wouldn’t be an issue because her landlady let the dogs out into the backyard several times a day, just as a favor to Tavie. Daisy lived on the first floor, and loved the two rescued mutts, even while she bemoaned Tavie’s silly names for them. Sparkplug looked like a squat bulldog mix while Puddles A. Lott was part terrier, part Chihuahua, and all Heinz 57. They wouldn’t care who fed them as long as they got some attention. They wouldn’t miss her much, but Tavie’s parents would be heartbroken. So would Daisy. Charlie would probably cry, too. The gruff old bear would brush the tears away before anyone else could see.

  It was that man who taught her to assess her setting, to figure out what the strengths and her weaknesses were in a given situation. Tavie found a spot that was slightly elevated and sat against one of the little weird black trees and contemplated the people wandering to and fro in the downtown area of…

  Deadsville.

  Haha. Why not call it Dead Town? Dead City? Deadsburg? Deadston? Deadstead? Deadington?

  Nope. Deadsville.

  It was funny but she wasn’t really hungry. She wasn’t thirsty either. The guy had sold out of Twinkies and the thought of eating one of those should have made her salivate, but that was a no go. The dead were eating, although they didn’t really need to eat. She had seen one guy with a broken off railroad tie speared through his guts scarf down a Twinkie after trading his wrist watch for one.

  Why eat? Psychological? Tavie grimaced. Was that what the dead really do? They sit around and gaze at their navels and wonder whose religion got it correct? There wasn’t a lot of reasons to believe that Sternstein was right. She looked back at the welcoming committee from her view atop a small hill with a solitary black tree at her back. There had been a glut of dead and they had been crowding around the committee members like moths drawn to a bright light.

  A woman in a cream and purple flowered muumuu shrieked, “WE’RE NOT DEAD AND YOU CAN’T PROVE IT!”

  The tall man who had been speaking to her immediately pushed to his feet. His eyes gleamed even in the murkiness. His broad shoulders filled out his suit, which was the kind of three piece suit with a red power tie a politician or a CEO would wear to a meeting of the board. He moved in a lethal manner and abruptly, the hair stood up on the back of Tavie’s arms. Something was going to happen and she was well aware of it. He calmly grasped the arm of the muumuu and yanked it forward with his left hand while reaching inside his jacket with his right hand. He whipped out a long knife, some kind of Japanese tantō, and neatly sliced off her arm just below the elbow.

  The woman in the muumuu was too shocked to say anything and a cohesive gasp from the crowd filled the momentarily hollow world. Tavie had her hand inside her own jacket just before the man with the tantō calmly put his blade back where he’d gotten it. His left hand dropped the body part
as if it was a piece of trash. The hand fell to the ground and the fingers twitched spastically.

  The muumuu stumbled back and her mouth moved in wordless screams of horror. She held up her arm and stared at it while her mouth opened and closed. The crowd simply parted around her and no one said anything. The man with the suit sat back down and crossed his arms over his chest.

  The muumuu spun around and mutely appealed for help. She held her diminished arm up in the air as if that would prevent it from bleeding out. However, the pale end of the stub wasn’t bleeding and it didn’t look like it had ever bled. Specifically, it looked as if a little bluish liquid oozed before she twisted it around in her search for assistance. For a long moment, no one moved. No one said anything, and then the muumuu gasped loudly.

  “It hurts less,” she said with plain disbelief. She motioned with the cut part of her arm and then swiveled to see where the severed piece lay. “My hand is vanishing!”

  “If you were alive, it wouldn’t do that,” the man in the suit said. “It’ll take a few hours but it’ll be back on your arm eventually. It takes the spirit flesh a bit of time to figure out where it belongs.”

  The crowd made various noises.

  Sternstein laughed from where he still sat on one side. “Maximillian has to do that to someone’s arm at least once a month,” he said loudly. It sounded like rote to Tavie. He’d made the mocking statement before.

  “Not true,” Maximillian disagreed. “Not so long ago I did that to a man’s legs. Right at the ankles. Boy, was he ticked off. And he didn’t like being on the ground much, either.”

  A roll of energy dissipated through the mob. The muumuu made her way to the side, staring at her arm. Then she glared at Maximillian and then she glanced at her flip-flop covered feet as if suspecting he would go for those next.