Tommy forced himself to take a deep breath. This was just like any combat mission.
He could do it.
He was stronger than anyone.
He stepped forward and right through the back of Ben, making sure he stayed covering Ben as much as possible.
The kid was sick.
Really, really twisted sick.
And he had long ago lost the ability to tell right from wrong.
Tommy felt dirty just seeing Ben’s thoughts and his life. But this was a mission to save a life.
First, Tommy forced Ben’s feet to not move.
He needed Ben to stay still so that he could maintain his connection to him completely.
His entire will just forced its way into Ben, freezing his feet to the floor next to the phone.
Then Tommy had an idea on how to get Ben to confess.
Tommy remembered back to that first mission in Afghanistan and the huge amount of guilt he had felt for killing those men in that car.
Ben had no guilt, so Tommy started to give him some.
And then he flooded it at the sick kid, making him feel the pain, the loss, everything.
Ben bent over and supported himself on the table, scared for the first time, and wondering what was happening.
Tommy kept inside him completely, even bent over.
Tommy kept repeating over and over, “I saw too much death tonight.”
Finally Ben said that. “I saw too much death tonight.”
“Tell the sheriff what I have done.”
Tommy started repeating again and again, pounding at Ben, never letting up on his guilt feelings from those missions.
Finally, Tommy willed Ben to pick up the phone and dial the sheriff’s number.
Tommy heard through Ben the sheriff come on the phone with a gruff “Yeah.”
“Girl in my shed.” Tommy willed Ben to say. Tommy poured on even more guilt. And kept repeating “I’ve seen enough death. Girl in my shed. I don’t want to kill her. Stop me.”
Finally Ben said those exact words to the sheriff.
“What?” the sheriff said.
Tommy really, really pushed, hard, pouring on every bit of guilt he had, forcing Ben to say those words again.
“Girl in my shed,” Ben said. “I don’t want to kill her. Please stop me. Too much death.”
On the other end of the line the sheriff laid down the phone softly.
Tommy really understood now how smart the sheriff was.
Tommy wanted to get out of this sick kid’s mind and body, but he didn’t. He kept Ben’s feet pinned to the floor and repeating over and over what he had said into the phone.
Two of the longest minutes Tommy had ever spent, he heard Jewel say softly, “Sheriff’s here.”
Thirty seconds later she said, “Looks like Carl from the gas station is also here. He’s armed with a rifle as well.”
Tommy kept focused on Ben, keeping his feet firmly planted to the floor, keeping him repeating over and over into the phone his confession.
“Sheriff just looked in the window,” Jewel said. “They are coming in, guns drawn.”
Tommy heard a smash as Carl kicked in the door, but didn’t let Ben react. Tommy just kept Ben repeating over and over that there was a girl in his shed and he didn’t want to kill her.
“Ben!” the sheriff said, pointing his gun at the young kid.
Tommy decided it was best to get it all out now, everything he knew about this sick kid.
“I killed my mother,” Tommy had Ben say. “I killed the other two. They are buried in the back woods behind the shed. I’ve seen too much death tonight. I don’t want to kill the girl in the shed.”
Tommy could feel the sheriff come around behind Ben, take the phone out of his hand, and quickly slip handcuffs on him.
So Tommy stepped away and back into only his own thoughts, out of the sick perversions of a very evil person.
To Tommy, it felt like he had just climbed out of a dark cesspool and into sunlight and fresh air.
Tommy could feel that most of his energy was gone. He staggered and Jewel caught him.
“You did it,” she said, hugging him, beaming. “You did it. Are you all right?”
Tommy nodded, feeling the energy from Jewel flowing into him. “I will be.”
She hugged him again.
Tommy looked over at Carl, a tall man with a good heart, who fixed cars for a living. He was about Tommy’s height and had gained a beer gut. He was clutching his 30-30 deer rifle in his hands and looked like he might be sick. He had tossed on his overalls and boots, but didn’t have a shirt under the overalls.
“Sheriff?” Ben said, suddenly coming back to his senses. “What are you doing here? Carl? What did you do to my front door?”
Tommy glanced over at the door that was now smashed and hanging barely by one hinge.
Ben looked at the phone on the table, then felt the handcuffs. “What’s happening?”
“We’re going to go have a look at that shed of yours,” the sheriff said, yanking Ben by the arm and out the back door of the trailer.
Jewel looked at him. “Seems anything we have someone do or say, they can’t remember,” she said. “Learning a lot this first night of death.”
“Too much,” Tommy said.
He kept leaning on Jewel and enjoying the feel of her beside him. His strength was coming back and at the same time he was pushing the thoughts of being inside Ben’s head away.
He felt a little like he was just scrubbing out his mind.
“Do you have a warrant, sheriff?” Ben asked as they started across the backyard.
The sheriff damn near knocked Ben to the ground with that statement. Tommy wished he had.
“You told me, flat out to my face, there’s a woman in there and you don’t want to kill her,” the sheriff said, his voice so angry he could hardly contain himself. “Like you did your mom and two others. I think that’s enough reason to go in there, don’t you?”
Ben went silent.
Big Carl took an old rusted ax from beside the shed and knocked open the lock.
A few minutes later, Ben was sitting handcuffed hands and feet in the back of the sheriff’s car where an hour before he and Jewel had sat naked.
Jewel had gone to the girl again and worked to keep her calm, telling her that Carl and the sheriff, even though scary-looking, were her friends.
Tommy watched her, nodding. They really had saved that girl’s life and they were dead.
He had no idea how that worked. But he wanted to find out. Being dead was one thing.
Being dead and still useful was another.
ELEVEN
BY THE TIME they had walked the mile, hand-in-hand, down to Tommy’s home on the lake, Jewel was again frozen and her teeth were chattering. The sun was starting to paint the tops of the mountains with a slight orange color.
It was really, really beautiful but she couldn’t enjoy it because her clothes were again wet.
But even shivering and knowing she was dead, she somehow felt great. They had managed to save that poor girl. The images of the girl’s terror were slowly fading from Jewel’s mind as she shoved them back.
Tommy had said that it felt like his brain was scrubbing out Ben’s thoughts. That was exactly the way it felt with the poor girl’s thoughts. Jewel didn’t want to remember them and they were fading quickly.
Tommy’s home turned out to be a beautiful lakefront house with a dock and everything. The lake was a black, flat surface and the mountains were white and showing orange from the sunrise.
And as they walked through the closed front door, the heat hit her.
“Thankfully, I left so fast, I didn’t turn down the heat,” Tommy said.
“Tough to turn up a thermostat when your hand goes through it,” Jewel said.
She had no doubt that if it was possible for ghosts to touch something, they were going to need to learn how to do that.
“This way,” he said as she marveled
at his fantastic kitchen and the view out the back.
He led her into what was clearly his bedroom. The room was comfortable and lived in. The quilts on the bed had been pushed up, but the bed wasn’t made. The furniture was a solid-looking wooden chair sitting beside a wooden chest of drawers. A couple of pairs of boots and a pair of tennis shoes sat beside the chair.
One side of his wall closet was open and she watched as almost without thinking or remembering he was a ghost, he reached up and grabbed a flannel shirt from a hanger.
The shirt stayed on the hanger, but a ghost shirt came off in his hands.
He stood there staring at the shirt on the hanger and then at the one in his hands.
She moved over and touched the ghost shirt. It felt as real as anything.
“Who knew clothes had ghost shadows,” she said, laughing.
“You know,” he said, “I always thought death was just going to be blackness and nothingness. I never expected to have to learn a brand new world.”
She had thought a lot about death when in Seattle. She had seen so much of it, she honestly never came to any conclusions about what death would be. But if she had, it wouldn’t be the death state she found herself in now.
“Get out of those wet clothes and put that on,” he said, handing her the soft flannel shirt.
Then he grabbed another one for himself, again looking at the shirt still on the hanger and the one in his hands.
“I wonder if this is just because it’s your clothes,” she said.
She reached up and pulled down another shirt. It was soft in her hand, but the original stayed in place.
“That’s just too weird,” she said.
Then she started to undress again, for the second time, in front of a hot man she had only known for about fourteen hours.
She hoped he was watching her.
TWELVE
TOMMY FLAT ENJOYED watching Jewel once again strip out of her wet clothes and then put on his soft, flannel shirt. She buttoned up the shirt, pulled her wet hair back and then stood there, smiling at him.
“You look stunning,” he said. “But wish that shirt wasn’t so long.”
She laughed. “Got some running shorts around here somewhere?”
“In the third drawer,” he said, pointing to his wooden chest of drawers in his bedroom.
He watched as she went over and tried to pull it open and failed. Then she just stuck her hand through the wood and pulled out a fistful of his shorts. She tossed them on the bed, took one pair, and slipped it on much to his disappointment.
“Slippers?”
He pointed to the bottom of the closed part of the closet.
Seeming like she had been doing it forever, she stuck her head and shoulders through the wooden closet sliding door, letting her butt stick out, sadly covered by his running shorts.
After a moment she pulled out two pair of his slippers.
“I’ll wear the dark brown ones,” Tommy said, also pulling on a pair of running shorts. “The lighter ones are too small for me.”
“Perfect,” she said, slipping her feet into them.
Her feet looked like a child’s feet in his big slippers, but she nodded.
“I won’t be running in these,” she said, “but they feel warm and soft.”
They hung their clothes around in the bathroom to dry, then headed back to the kitchen.
“Now what do we do?” she asked, sitting down on a stool pulled up to the island area in the big kitchen.
Tommy looked around a little. The entire kitchen was all wood cabinets with state-of-the art appliances his dad had put in last year. Then he heard what he had thought.
“Dad.”
“Oh, shit,” she said, her eyes wide, understanding exactly what he meant. “Family and friends.”
He nodded, trying to push away what his death was going to do to his father. “I feel so much alive, I forgot we were really dead.”
“Me to,” she said, clearly lost in her own thoughts.
They remained in silence for a minute. He couldn’t imagine how his dad would feel. He had two sisters, but he wasn’t that close to them. But his father was, and his father would need them now.
He knew his father had come to terms with the chance that Tommy might be killed in Afghanistan, but this sudden accidental death would knock him down. Mother had died slowly, from cancer, and that damn near killed his father. This would be as bad, if not worse.
“Are your parents still alive?” she asked.
“Father,” he said. “He and I were pretty close. This is his house, actually. Two sisters, some buddies from the Marines. How about you?”
“Both parents died in a boating accident when I was a senior in high school,” she said. “No brothers or sisters. Just friends from college and med school and my residency.”
Again they dropped into silence before Tommy looked out at the sun coming up over the lake. “Dad is in Spokane, along with one of my sisters. They will be up here later today. So we need to get out of here.”
“Don’t want to be here when they arrive?” she asked.
“No,” he said, shaking his head. “That’s the last thing I want to do.”
He wasn’t sure if he could handle seeing how much he had hurt his father by dying. He needed to leave them to grieve on their own.
“Let’s go to my place,” she said. “Since the city is leasing it to me, no one will bother with it or my stuff for a few days I bet. We can decide what we are doing next there.”
He nodded. “We have a few hours here to let things dry out again first.”
She nodded. “And if you can find a ghost pack, you can take some clothes as well.”
He had to switch the topic from thinking about his father and family. “Are you hungry?”
She looked puzzled. “I just might be.”
Then, as she said that, she said, “Damn it, now I have to pee as well.”
He laughed. “Now I do as well.”
“Guess things turn on slowly in this ghost world,” she said as she started down the hall.
“Second door on the left,” he said. “Closed one. Hope I left the lid up.”
“I can go in the sink just fine if I have to,” she said, smiling at him as she headed down the hall.
He headed for the bathroom off his bedroom. He knew for certain he had left the lid up there.
Strange things ghosts had to worry about. He could go through doors, get people to confess to crimes, but couldn’t lift a toilet seat lid.
This ghost world was going to be interesting, he had no doubt.
THIRTEEN
HE HAD HIS head in the fridge, through the fridge door, actually, when she came back to the kitchen. He couldn’t see a thing because the light was off in there, but it frosted his face quickly.
“That looks really strange,” she said.
He managed in the dark, from memory, to grab a couple of apples and pull them out. At least ghost apples. He was fairly certain their original real-world partners were still in the fridge.
He held one up for her and she nodded and took it. She bit into hers first, then smiled. “Wow, that’s good.”
“How is this possible?” he asked, staring at the apple and then biting into it as well, getting juice on his chin. Jewel was right, it tasted wonderful. Better than any apple he had remembered.
“Seems that most everything has a ghost component,” she said.
“Including us, it seems,” he said.
“Yeah, does seem that way.”
“Bottle of water?” he asked as she took another bite of the apple.
She nodded, so he stuck his arm back through the fridge door and grabbed a couple of bottles of water. Ghost water again. He handed one to her, then opened and drank out of the other.
Tasted just like water.
She looked at him and frowned. “How long do you want to stay here?”
The image of his father flashed into his mind. Knowing his father, he would have gott
en the news in the middle of the night. He would have called Carol, Tommy’s youngest sister, and the two of them would have headed this way within an hour.
More than likely they got the call last night while Tommy and Jewel were still on the mountain road. Tommy knew well that the drive from his father’s place to here was five hours, so they might be getting here in a couple of hours.
“We need to be getting out of here,” he said.
Jewel nodded and took one more bite from her apple.
He set his bottle of water and half-eaten apple down on the counter.
“Let’s get dressed, see if we can find you a coat and hat and gloves for the walk to your place.”
“Mind if I just keep this shirt on?” she asked, smiling at him. “It’s toasty.”
“I’m disappointed I won’t get to see you nude again,” he said, “but sure.”
She laughed. “I’ll flash you for good measure.”
“Promises, promises.
As they packed clothes for him, and found her a coat, she did as promised, which made him smile.
Twenty minutes, with a very light bag of ghost clothes over his shoulder, they headed out.
Jewel had put on her still-damp pants and shoes, borrowing dry socks from him as well. She had on his blue ski parka that draped on her, a matching ski hat, and gloves that made her hands look huge. But at least she would be warmer in the two-mile walk they had to do right through town.
He had on dry jeans, with two more pair packed in the bag. And a bunch of socks and underwear and shirts, plus an extra pair of shoes. He had no idea where they were headed, but better to take what he needed at the moment.
The rain had stopped and the clouds were now high, with occasional sun breaks. It was still cold, but it looked like the day might turn out decent weather.
On the way into town, as they walked along the road, not really talking, he looked up and saw his father’s white Jeep headed toward them. His father loved that older Jeep Cherokee and drove it more than he drove his Lexus.
He could feel his stomach twist up into a knot.
He took a deep breath of the fresh morning air and that calmed him a little.
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