by Nick Pirog
I kept my eyes on Erica. “He raped and beat a thirteen-year-old girl.”
Ethan had testified against me in court. The city was sued for $7 million and the case against the scumbag was dropped. I, of course, was sent packing the next day. I may or may not have smashed Ethan’s face against a locker on my departure.
I locked eyes with Ethan and said, “If I could go back and do it all over again, I would have killed him.”
This drew silence from everyone.
Ethan and I were left staring at one another. The two alpha males. There were a couple dozen people on this planet who would relish Mr. Thomas Dergen Prescott ceasing to exist. In fact, I had a note in a safety deposit box somewhere with a list of suspects should I take a bullet in the temple, get pushed in front of a Greyhound, or develop a suspicious case of necrotizing fasciitis. Ethan Kates wasn’t at the top of the list, but his name was on there.
Ethan chomped on his gum and smirked. I was tempted to rearrange some more of his cartilage.
Erica finally broke the tension. She touched me lightly on the elbow and said, “Why don’t you tell these guys how you found the body.”
I took a deep breath and started in.
Arrival
(Maddy Young Saga 1)
www.nickthriller.com
Chapter 1.
Arrival
“How did you die?”
I turned my head. The girl couldn’t have been more than seven. She had light brown hair held back in a ponytail. Her nose was dusted with light freckles, her cheeks as well, only not as densely as the freckles on her nose. She waited a second for my response, then said, “I went into diabetic shock.”
I nodded, like this wasn’t the craziest thing I’d ever heard.
She continued, “I have an uncle here. Uncle Trent. He died in a car crash when I was five. I’m supposed to go live with him I guess.”
She wrinkled her nose. I had a feeling she didn’t like Uncle Trent. Maybe Uncle Trent was like my Uncle Bill. Maybe Uncle Trent liked to make up stories after ten cans of Miller High Life, then get pissed off when you told him he was full of shit.
“So how did you die?” she came again.
This was the hundredth time I’d been posed that question in three days. How did you die? It was yet to lose its level of absurdity.
I took a deep breath and said, “I slipped in the shower.” I kept the part about how I’d been jerking off at the time to myself. No sense upsetting this delicate flower more than was necessary.
I surveyed the other people in the small room. There were twelve altogether. Plus me. A baker’s dozen. Each was clad in the same getup. Scrubs. That blue meets green color. Coolmint. There were two black people. A man and a woman. Both appeared to be in their thirties. A boy around fifteen, his hair dangling in his eyes. Two old people. One in a wheelchair. One sucking from an oxygen tank. A couple of men around fifty. An Asian woman. Then four women of that indiscriminate age between fifty and sixty.
I peered more closely at the woman to my right. Her eyes were puffy, the lines of her face stretched tight with fear. In fact, as I swept over each individual, I noticed the only shared trait among the group was the fear. Like each was staring into the face of a Bengal tiger.
My gaze returned to the small girl. She was the exception. She didn’t have the fear. In fact, at the present moment, she had something black in her hands. I was not so far removed from childhood that I knew it was a PSP. Playstation Portable. She noticed my eyeing her and smiled. She said, “Grand Theft Auto.”
I found myself letting out a small chuckle. My first in the past seventy-two-hour period. Not many laughs when no one will tell you anything, you are asked thousands of questions, are continually hooked to a machine, have a hand shoved in your ass, your balls fondled, every mole on your body inspected, your teeth cleaned, eyes checked, and are drained of at least a gallon of blood.
The girl continued, “I was up playing it all night. I forgot to take my insulin. I was playing it when I died. They gave it to me a couple days ago.”
She broke eye contact and went back to her game. Interesting. She died and her PSP had come with her. Did this mean that when her parents walked into her room the next morning and found her dead, her PSP was gone? Or was it there, clasped in the whites of her hands. I didn’t have much else to go on. I mean, the only thing in my hand when I died was my dick.
In three days, there hadn’t been many answers—only promises that in time everything would make sense. The only answer, the only definitive thing that anyone would share, the only time anyone would look you directly in the eye was when you asked them if you had died.
They wouldn’t waver, they wouldn’t blink, they would only nod their head and say, “Yes.”
⠔
It was silent for the next ten minutes. Everyone anticipating the door opening and answers walking through. The room itself was antiseptic. A third grade classroom meets a military quarantine. The windowless walls were a light blue. There were four rows of four chairs. Three empties. The chairs were white plastic, just slightly reclined, but not enough to relax, or be comfortable in any way. There was a flat screen television on the facing wall. I was in the front row, ten feet from the large-screen TV. It was on screensaver and the manufacturer's name was plastered on the icy blackness in giant white lettering.
SONYY.
The overall energy in the room was similar to a doctor’s waiting room. Or more accurately, an oncologist’s waiting room. Like everyone here had found a lump and was waiting to hear they would be okay. Or if they would surely die. Only, everyone here was already dead. That’s what I was trying to wrap my head around when the silence was broken. Not by any sound, but by the stale air diffusing into parts unknown.
The door exhaled, a leg propping it open. The owner of the leg was also the proud owner of a white lab coat, its bottom half hanging over brown slacks, which led to brown dress shoes. A doctor’s leg. In the silence it was evident the doctor was having a conversation with someone in the hallway.
I strained to hear the words, but I could only hear the muffled, throaty voices of grown men. After thirty seconds, the man straightened, and walked briskly into the room. I squinted. He looked to be in his late thirties. He had that perfect olive skin you only see on commercials and in magazines. He had a sharp nose and thin, wispy brown hair. He was maybe 5’10”, maybe a hundred and sixty pounds. This put him six inches shorter than me and six pound lighter. He wasn’t unattractive. Nor was he striking. He struck me as a Matt. If you took all six men leaning forward, almost hovering over their uncomfortable white plastic chairs, and put them in a blender, Matt might be what you came out with.
Matt walked to the front of the room, settling in directly in front of the flat screen. That second Y, that extra Y that someone had decided to tack onto the old reliable lettering that had been imprinted on my DVD player, that unnecessary Y that was causing me more grief and anxiety than the Bar exam I’d been studying for, was still visible, clinging to the right edge of Dr. Matt’s lab coat.
Matt cleared his throat and in a voice a hundred pounds heavier than his body, he told us his name was Dr. Raleigh. He had a disarming manner about him and you could almost feel the collective pulse of the room drop a hundred points. He said, “Now I’m sure you have plenty of questions and over the next couple days, I will try to answer most, if not all of them.”
“Where are we?”
Twelve heads turned and stared at the black man who had blurted out the question we’d all been thinking for the past three days. At least the question I’d been thinking for the past three days. I couldn’t be certain how long each of my classmates had been here.
Everyone whipped their heads backwards and bore their eyes into Dr. Raleigh. He gave a wry smile and said, “The truth of it all is that no one knows—”
I almost heard myself yell, “What? What do you mean nobody knows. What kind of lame answer is that?”
If I did say these words alou
d they were drowned out by a woman bursting into tears and someone—I think the same black man—jumping out of his seat and screaming, “Nobody knows! My ass! Where the fuck are we?”
“He wasn’t finished.”
I looked at the young girl. She was staring at the black man, her video game held in one hand. “He wasn’t finished,” she repeated.
The man sat down. The room went silent. I found myself fighting back a smile.
Dr. Raleigh looked at the small girl and said, “Thank you. You’re right, I wasn’t finished.”
He waited for her to acknowledge him, but she was already back to her video game. Already in the process of stealing a car. Or killing a hooker.
Dr. Raleigh looked up and said, “As I said, nobody knows what this place is, or where it is. The truth is that it doesn’t matter. This is, for all intents and purposes, the same as where you came from. Where we all came from. It’s the same Earth. Same solar system: Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter. All of them. The food is the same, the weather is the same, TV is basically the same, the buildings look almost the same, the cars. Most things are the same. There are, of course, some small differences, but we’ll get to that later. The only major difference between where you are now and where you were is, everyone here has died.”
I noticed he didn’t say that everyone here was dead. For all of us, all thirteen of us, plus Dr. Raleigh, we were very much alive. Not ghosts, not replicas of our old selves. This wasn’t heaven or hell, or some sort of purgatory. We were the same exact person on the same exact Earth and with, as far as I could construe, the same exact problems. Only we had died. Only the seven-year-old girl next to me forgot to take her insulin and she’d died. And I couldn’t shake the image of Joni Isaac bending over to get her notebook and I was jerking off in the shower and I slipped and hit my temple on the water spigot and I’d died.
I looked around the room. My comrades didn’t seem to feel as relieved about the prognosis as I did. For the most part, faces were still stricken, eyes still puffy, heads still down. But then again, most of these people had families. Families they would never see again. Kids, they would never play with again. Other than me, the teenager, and the young girl, there was a good chance everyone in this room had children they would never again lay eyes on.
For the first time in my life, I felt lucky. Lucky I only talked to my parents for six or seven minutes once a year, five of those minutes spent listening to my father talk about how his portfolio had grown in the last quarter and his recent real estate purchases throughout Fort Lauderdale. Lucky my only sibling was twenty-five years older than me, with a family, and a job, and didn’t want to be a part of her accidental little brother’s life. Lucky I moved out the day I left for college and never looked back. Lucky I never took a dime of my father’s millions. Lucky I was a loner.
No, I had no idea what any of these people were feeling. How could I? How could I possibly know what any of these people were going through? I couldn’t. Couldn’t even scratch the surface.
“Yes.”
I looked up. Dr. Raleigh was looking at one of the menopausal fifty-something women. She had her hand raised.
Dr. Raleigh said, “You have a question.”
She sniffed a couple times and said, “They must have a name for this place. They must call it something.”
“Actually they do.” He cleared his throat and said, “Welcome to Two.”
Chapter 2.
Orientation
Dr. Raleigh said he was going to show us a short movie and if we still had questions after the movie, he would answer them. The lights dimmed and SONYY faded from the screen. The last movie I’d watched was the Adventureland DVD. I was a movie fanatic, going to the theater once or twice a week, sometimes with a buddy from law school, sometimes with a girl, but mostly by myself. It’s sad that I wouldn’t necessarily miss my own father, but I would miss Matt Damon.
The TV came to life, showing exactly what I’d expected, a long-distance shot of Earth. And Dr. Raleigh hadn’t been lying. It looked the same. Six continents. Four oceans.
A voice over began.
“As you can see it is the same Earth as you remember. And as far as our scientists can tell, it behaves as such. But is it identical? Probably not, and for no other reason than a different group of people inhabits this Earth. It would be foolish to think we would have the same impact as our fellow humans had on the past Earth. And how long have people been here in Two? Well, for as long as people have been dying.”
The planet faded and small clips began running. A series of businessmen and women hustling and bustling into a metropolitan high-rise. A bunch of Asian people wading through rice paddies, their faces partially hidden under large straw hats. A professional football game. One team looked like the Patriots, the other had the colors of the Raiders, but there was a different emblem on the helmet. The Patriots were killing them.
I recalled what Dr. Raleigh had said, “Most things are the same. There are, of course, some small differences.”
The stadium was packed. People were still screaming. People still had beers and hot dogs in their hands. The Los Angeles Raiders look-alikes still sucked.
A voice-over began, “The population of Two is 2.4 billion people. Roughly, one third of the 6.6 billion people living on the past Earth. It is not known how people come to be here. How they are chosen. Or if they are chosen. There is no pattern.” They ran a clip of every group of people you could imagine—white, black, Russian, Muslims, Christians, Koreans, Jews, militants. “No race, no religion, no sect, has a greater percentage of its dead that come to Two.”
They showed news coverage of the recent election. A reporter was asking a wrinkled old man, who had to be in his nineties, about the new president. Underneath the old man was the caption, “Ex-president John F. Kennedy weighs in on president elect Jonathan Hart.”
I could hear the two old men in the back rustling. I had a feeling this had hit home with both of them.
They showed clips from a tsunami that had hit India and a bunch of soldiers unpacking aid relief supplies. They showed clips of war. It appeared there was still fighting in the Middle East. A news correspondent spoke of the fighting. A couple countries had different names. Harazz. Jerualamabad.
They showed a clip from the Olympics. The 2008 Olympics were held in Chile. They ran the trailer from Heath Ledger’s new movie, The Flyaway.
After another ten minutes of short clips they cut to a man. He was standing on the steps of a government building. I thought I recognized him, some local actor or news reporter who had been in a plane crash when I first moved to Colorado. He said, “As you can see, our world is the same as the world you are used to. I’m standing here on the steps of the capitol building in beautiful Denver, Colorado. As you can see it resembles the capitol building you have seen or even visited in your previous life. Of course it couldn’t be identical. It was built by different people.”
I took a second to digest this. I’d assumed that all these buildings, take the capitol for instance, had been here. But that wasn’t the case. People had died, then people had built a capitol building. It was only natural the people who built it would want it to resemble the capitol building they remembered. That’s why it was similar. But not identical.
The man continued, “In case you are wondering, you are in Denver right now. You are sitting in a Two Adjustment Facility or TAF.”
So, I was still in Denver. Just a different Denver. I thought of that old Andy Garcia movie, Things to Do in Denver When You’re Dead.
Right.
“You will remain at the TAF for five days, whereby the staff will decide whether it is safe for you to enter Two.”
This didn’t sit well with me. A bit too 1984 for my taste. I’d basically been on my own since I was thirteen and now you were telling me that after having my body and brain poked and prodded, they were going to tell me if I was suited for reentry.
I gave a quick glance at the door. If I made a break for it,
could I make it outside? Or would I be tackled and sent God knows where? No, better to show I was a well-adjusted young man.
Anyhow, the movie lasted only a couple more minutes, then the lights flickered on.
Dr. Raleigh walked to the front of the room and said, “Well, I hope that answered most of your questions. At least for now. Over the course of the next five days many more of your questions will be answered. Does anyone have any other questions right now?”
I looked around. No one raised their hand. I had plenty of questions, questions about how the little girl’s PSP came with her, and questions about the cut on the side of my head, and how if you died of cancer, did you still have cancer, and questions about why one of three people who died came here and where did those other people go.
I had so many questions. But like all the others, I kept my questions to myself.
⠔
The door opened and two men walked in with boxes. They quickly went around the room and handed a box to everyone. I opened my box and found a turkey sandwich on whole wheat, an apple, a bag of almonds, and a bottle of water. The exact lunch I’d gotten for the past three days.
The men exited and Dr. Raleigh said, “I thought we would have a quick bite to eat and each of you would go around the room and tell us a bit about yourself. Where you lived, your family, and how you died. This might be hard for some of you, but I can assure you it is the first step to adjusting to your new surroundings. Some of you may still be in denial and it might help some of you accept the fact that your old life is gone.”
For the next twenty minutes, the only sounds were those of lips smacking, the seals of bottles coughing, and the crack of apples skins piercing. Finally, Dr. Raleigh said, “Okay, who wants to start?”
