After dinner, Cricket helped Beth bring the dirty dishes upstairs, while Reg stayed behind downstairs to scrub the grill and Amanda tinkered with the gas feed at the burner nozzles. Pog was already setting oatmeal on to soak for tomorrow’s breakfast.
Cricket took Pog aside. “I want to do something nice for Amanda. She’s crazy about this basketball thing. We need to find a team we can compete with.”
“Town’s full of guys who would love to play us,” Pog remarked, putting out big tubs of chopped walnuts, raisins, dried apple bits and cranberries, chocolate chips, and cinnamon sugar.
“She says it’s not fair, us being demons. We’d always win.” Cricket smirked. “Besides them not being able to keep their thingies from sticking out because you’re all so sexy.”
Pog sent Cricket a wary look. “So?”
“So we should play some demon teams. I mean, hell, the Regional Office, is full of demons, right? I bet she’d love to play them. We could win and make her proud.”
Slowly Pog wiped her hands on her apron and hung the apron on a hook. “You think Ish can set it up?”
“Beats me.” Cricket shrugged. “All I’m saying is, Amanda works hard. She doesn’t ask for much. She took me for a roommate without being asked. I want to get her something special.”
“Ish hates putting himself out. He’s the laziest manager in the Regional Office.” Pog pulled a beer out of her personal fridge and knocked the cap off into the box on the wall. “He’d hate it.” She started to smile.
“Oh.” That smile was promising. “So, no?”
Pog drank some beer. “I didn’t say it was a bad idea.” She smiled some more.
Cricket watched hopefully while Pog made thinky faces. Finally the team leader said, “Let me get back to you.” When Reg came in carrying dirty barbecue tools, she pointed at him, “Dude. Six pitchers of margaritas, stat. It’s hot tub time.”
Cricket bounced with glee. “Hot tub!”
The hot tub was a hoot, too. Cricket experimented with drinking too many margaritas. This gave her a headache for five minutes. Then Pog taught her how to get rid of the headache. At three in the morning, everyone but Cricket trailed downstairs to bed, Pog nagging them to carry their margarita cups and pitchers with them.
Cricket lay back in the hot tub alone.
For once the night sky was clear, and the midsummer air was dry enough to let a few stars shine through the eternal, faintly orange haze of street lights. Barbecue smells rose to their rooftop from all over the neighborhood.
Cricket found her thoughts circling around to her personal volcano. Three-forty-five in the morning would be here soon. She would think about death for half an hour, then fall abruptly asleep at four-fifteen. Should get out of the hot tub. Don’t want to drown in my sleep.
Wonderingly she looked down at her newly-young body, its high little breasts and taut belly. What kind of a life had she fallen into? Only her hands looked nearer her true age, wrinkly from hours in the water.
Was this death, then? Was she in hell? Correction, the Regional Office? But the girls all said this was the real world—the field. So was she dead?
If Delilah had been right, her volcano had come and gone in that one swift balletic flight out of the recruiter’s BMW, ending with her impact against that tree in the cemetery. Cricket appreciated the sensitivity shown to her: do it quick, so she doesn’t have time to think about it. But for someone who had been old for a good third of her life now, Cricket felt cheated. Her lifelong curiosity, stronger than the fear of death, apparently, made her wish now for a slower end. She had always expected she would see it coming, so she could savor every terrifying moment.
Fear, that was what was missing. Cricket’s nights had been punctuated by that half-hour of fear ever since her first husband died suddenly of a heart attack at forty-three. She could stay chipper and involved with life all day along, even in her dreams. But come three-forty-five, every night, she lay staring at the ceiling, wondering, fearing.
Her second husband had been religious. When she spoke to him of that half-hour of fear, he’d shrugged. “It’s the fear of God,” he sometimes said. Other nights, he’d say, “It’s the fear of death.” Yet other nights he just groaned and said, “Go to sleep, Cricket.” Her third, Irv, hadn’t had a solid religious feeling, so he couldn’t even be afraid of anything specific when the cancer got hold of him.
But Cricket was faithful to her half-hour of fearful wonder, or wondering fear. She didn’t have any other faith. It was more like an emotion so strong that it was a hand squeezing her bowels. She distracted herself with worrying about the kids, or about Irving’s insurance, but those worries couldn’t grip. This fear was a live thing, like a pet cat that came up on the bed every damned night, waking you up, wanting to be petted while it purred, wanting a witness while it kneaded you with its sharp claws.
So, Cricket thought. Even after I’ve died, I have this feeling in the night.
But what if she hadn’t died? Delilah hadn’t actually said, You died when you hit that tree. What if she’d only been stunned? She actually felt annoyed that it had happened so quickly. Of course, if it was true, and Delilah really had brought her back to life in this fine young demon body without aches and crooked spots, maybe there was no bright light, no passage. She knew plenty of people back at the Loriston Home who stubbornly, even dejectedly vowed that there was no death experience, no judgment, no heaven or hell, no rules, no system, just a big nothing.
Cricket was a hog for experience. She would almost be willing to die again just to watch what really happened.
The breeze picked up suddenly. A tiny speck of cottonwood fluff drifted down out of the night and settled on Cricket’s damp left breast.
She stared up at the orange murk in the sky, suddenly unbearably frustrated. How much of her life had she spent curious and afraid of death, only to be gypped out of it now?
If Delilah and all these pretty girls were right, there was definitely a hell. They were all working for it. That implied strongly that she was entitled to expect more than this. So where was her promised moment of truth? Did she get to meet the big guy? When would she really know?
Cricket wriggled with impatience, slipped off the hot tub seat, slid under the warm water—still faintly perfumed by Jee’s expensive scent—and came up sputtering.
In that moment a daring thought came to her.
She’d died once already and come back. The girls seemed to think she couldn’t be killed. Was that true?
And if it was true, could she have another look, please?
Wasn’t much of a roller coaster, she thought indignantly, remembering that flashing flight through the air toward the tree. There’s got to be more.
She took hold of the edge of the hot tub and carefully, slowly, deliberately slid down under the surface. The water felt a lot warmer than the summer air. She lay staring up through the water at the now impenetrable sky. She realized she was holding her breath. Could she just let it out? At the very thought, she felt panic rise in her, and she bobbed to the surface again, gasping.
Huh. This was harder than she thought. She took a better grip on the hot tub edge, took a deep breath, and slid down into the warm water again.
Dummy. If you’re trying to drown, you don’t take a deep breath first. But it was instinctive. A person just naturally did that.
She felt her heart hammering in her ears, her pulse beating in her throat, screaming, Get up there and breathe. While she struggled with instinct and the slippery hot tub edge and her body’s rising panic, she slipped, wriggled, and floated to the surface, gasping.
Dammit.
She had some pills in her handbag downstairs in Amanda’s room...in her room, which she now shared with Amanda. No. She wanted to be awake for this. She wanted to see and hear and feel everything. She wanted to know. The pills would let her slip away in her sleep. She probably wouldn’t even notice dying if she took the pills. That would be as bad as hitting the tree. What kind
of idiot waited ninety-eight years to die and then slept through the experience?
Most idiots, if they’re lucky, she realized. Everyone she knew at the Loriston Home was obsessed with death, and yet they prayed it would happen when they weren’t paying attention. She shook her head.
Really interested now, she put her imagination to work on the problem of drowning herself even though she, or at least her body, didn’t want to die.
After much wriggling around and experimenting she found that if she laid her calves above her on the deck’s edge and then leaned back into the water, she submerged naturally. Using abdominal muscles she hadn’t had for decades, she could hold herself up for a brief while, until surprise and the lazy muscles let her slide under water. If she took a breath she could rise to the surface briefly. But then she sank just as fast. She played with this position, holding in breath, expelling it, feeling the panic of drowning come and go and finally fade almost completely.
Huh.
Finally she felt calm enough to try the next step, where she breathed in the yucky hot tub water. Her heart hammered madly. She stilled her panic, felt her lungs quiver and her sides tremble. Taking a mental pause, she steeled herself, and then drew in a long slow double-lungful of water.
AMANDA
I watched from the roof doorway, baffled. When Cricket hadn’t come downstairs with the rest, I’d figured the old girl wanted some alone time. Hells knew I needed it. Cricket could be fun, but good grief, it was hard to get her to stop talking.
Still, when she hadn’t come downstairs, my stomach started to feel jumpy. So here I was, spying on her.
Then I realized what was going on in the hot tub. Cricket hooked her legs outside the tub, lay back, submerged...and stayed down a long, long time. Her lower legs were rigid where they stuck out of the water. What was she doing?
There was a brief thrashing-splashing moment, and then she lay still again.
“What the fuck?” I roared, running to the hot tub. I grabbed her ankles and dragged her bodily out of the tub, banging the back of her head on the edge. She was heavy for such a little person—dead weight, I thought and panicked, although I knew better, I knew she couldn’t die—couldn’t stay dead anyway—still, I panicked.
Looking down at Cricket’s quiet body on the deck, I felt my heart squeeze. Had she simply been too old when she was recruited? I tipped her on her side. Water ran out of her mouth and nostrils. There was something you were supposed to do. Mouth to mouth.
I knelt over her, fitted my mouth to hers, what else do I do? Oh yes, close her nose with one hand. And puff into her.
Dead, Cricket looked young at last. Seventeen after all. That seemed fitting, until I realized that it meant she was still a demon, and her body was still invulnerable.
A rush of terrors old and new paralyzed me: what the hell was she doing? Did she have a death wish? Would I have to take her to the emergency room?
Fifty past trips to the emergency room flashed through my mind, some of them dating back before I was legal to drive. Sometimes Mom would have to go to the ER and I’d have her halfway there when Dad suddenly started choking on the front seat beside me, and I’d have to swerve around to get him to his ER at his hospital, because Mom was only jaundiced, but Dad was fibrillating.
I remembered thinking in a mindless, bitter panic the whole time, I’m too young to make these decisions. Not something you said around my Dad. A soldier had to decide.
I puffed into Cricket’s lungs.
Out of the corner of one eye I could see her chest rise as I pushed air into her. Puff. Puff. C’mon, Cricket, meet me halfway.
She convulsed.
I leaped up, grabbed her up by the ankles, and hung her up vertically at full length to let the water pour out of her onto the deck boards.
She coughed. Her ankles twisted in my hands. I laid her on the rooftop and let her twist and wriggle and cough up the rest of the water.
Meanwhile I tried to get my panicky heart to settle down.
“Well.” She choked and spat up more water. “That was an ant—anticlimax,” she said hoarsely, when she’d cleared her throat. She sat on her butt on the deck, leaning back on her hands with her knees in the air like a mudflap floozie, and gave me a feeble grin.
“Come on,” I said. I wanted to smack her on the ear for scaring me like that. “Let’s get you to bed. And then,” I took a deep breath, “you can tell me all about it.”
“I wanted to know what happens when you die,” Cricket explained. “I’ve been waiting thirty years to find out, and I was by-god gonna find out.”
“And did you?” I had a sudden morbid idea that if I died, my mother and father would be waiting for me in the hereafter, each holding a list of their medications.
“I don’t know.” She sounded frustrated. “There was the tunnel and the bright light and all. I got closer and closer to the light. I walked right up to it. And then I walked around behind it. It was, like, this cheap yard lamp clipped to the top of a six-foot aluminum stepladder. I gave it a kick, and it went clank, and the light jiggled a bit. I busted out laughing. And then I couldn’t breathe and I started coughing, and next minute you’re there, and I’m, well, I’m back.”
I laughed weakly.
“Kiddo, you have no idea what a big deal this is to old people,” she said.
I thought about my parents, living scared of the Army all their lives and then dying ugly, in and out of hospitals, when they were a lot younger than my chattery roommate. As much as I’d hated it—wow, I’d never admitted that to myself before—it couldn’t have been any fun for them. “Oh, I might.”
Cricket told me how she still woke up at night and thought about death. “Is that crazy? I’m done. I’ve died. Haven’t I? I mean, I’m a demon now. Anyway, it’s not my problem anymore. But I’m still curious. Not everybody gets a deal from Delilah.”
I put my finger to my lips. “Not that name.”
“Right, right.”
“I’m not totally sure you’re dead,” I said. “I know I never officially died.”
“So you don’t know either! I mean, what does happen for most people? First time I died, I got nothing. Then just now, I got this bright light and tunnel thing, which is a bust. I’m gonna keep trying and see what really happens,” she said with determination.
My heart clutched up. “Please don’t! I mean, please be careful.”
“Schviti, you can’t tell me no. I am the champion at sneaky disobedience.”
She was right. I couldn’t stop her from trying to kill herself until she was satisfied that she knew, or would never know, what happened when a person died. As if it was the same for everyone.
Hm, that’s a good argument right there. I told her what little I thought I knew. “Far as I know, if you have a plan, you get what you plan.”
I got thirty blessed seconds of silence. Then:
“What? Like, if I have some religion with angels and harps and that, I get that? And if I don’t, I don’t?”
I shrugged.
“Huh. Boy.” She was quiet for another minute. “I guess I didn’t have a plan. So, the first time, I didn’t see anything or anything. But then I went back, looking for the tunnel-and-light thing, and that’s what I got.”
“Sounds like you don’t take it very seriously.”
“Meh,” she admitted.
“So why did you try if you didn’t have a plan?” I said, trying to pull a Cricket on Cricket. “C’mon, you’re ninety-eight. You had to have some kind of plan.”
“I guess I thought I would just live forever.”
In the darkened bedroom, I spread my hand. “And here you are.”
Cricket gasped, and I thought oh shit, and then she gave a delighted laugh. “So I am!”
Great. Happy Cricket again. Maybe now she’ll go the fuck to sleep.
But no. “Tell me this now. Is it true what Del—the recruiter said about hell? They can’t buy my soul? I know I didn’t sign anything.”
“That? Yes. The Regional Office has suffered immense losses over the last three hundred years. Hardly any dead people are checking in. Recruitment is down over ninety-nine percent. There isn’t even enough work to keep the paper pushers busy. Going paperless in the eighties created an artificial labor demand. Then the Home Office went paperless and merged their system with ours over ten excruciating years in the late eighties and nineties, so the demons who were left were kept pretty busy.”
I shrugged. “Now? We can barely keep the staff we have. Only a tiny percentage of cubicles in each division are occupied. We do a crazy amount of makework, we eat out of the vending machines, we don’t have to go home.” I stopped. As usual when I was with Cricket, I’d said more than I meant to. “I’m told it’s pretty much the same in the Home Office.”
“Wait, there is a heaven?”
“Of course. A Christian heaven, a Jewish heaven, a Buddhist heaven, a Muslim heaven, a Taoist heaven, a Hindu heaven, a Viking heaven, a Mormon heaven, a heaven for fat people, a heaven for Disney fans. Who knows what else. Everybody’s got a heaven.”
I could hear the gears grinding in her head. “And a hell for each of those, too.”
“If you call it that. The Greeks and Romans didn’t split ’em up. They had one underground afterlife, pay the ferryman, get a trip across the river of forgetfulness in a boat. The old-timey Chinese go to this big elaborate underworld where they atone for their sins and plan their next incarnation and basically live like they did when they were here. The Vikings have a party.” I thought of Cricket’s yard lamp on a stepladder. “You gotta have a plan.”
She giggled. “I’ve always thought my friends at the Loriston Home planned to go to a megamall in the sky where the stores never close and you don’t have to pay. Or maybe Vegas. Or Disneyland.”
“I’m sure they’ll love it there.”
Twelve more seconds of silence. “Whew. Lot to think about.”
Coed Demon Sluts: Omnibus: Coed Demon Sluts: books 1-5 Page 69
