“It was the price I'd set. After all, J.P. Bafoures was good for it. I wanted to wipe the slate as clean as possible."
When I thought about it, I realized how right Paul was. Nine months ago, I didn't know who this “Brad Larsen” was either. I assumed it was a cover name for some higher-up in the Association who'd decided to screw his buddies over. The tip I heard was simple gossip: Bafoures was having some guy in Illinois killed. I inferred that this Larsen must be damned important if the Association was going to send a killer across a couple of states and give him a half a mil to boot. I happened to absorb a local Fed named Kevin Kennedy around the same time, and the rest is recent history.
Only there was no “Association.” There was no “Brad Larsen."
There was no point.
“So what brought you to this lovely place?” Paul asked.
I took a deep breath. This was going to be the best story Paul After would ever hear in this life. And quite possibly the next one. “Right after your… uh, experience with our client, Brad and Fieldman confronted me in the hotel lobby. Said they didn't need me anyone. Told me they'd killed you, and they were taking over the operation, and zappo, the next thing I know, my soul is in a toilet. I hitch a ride on our cat, when suddenly Amy from upstairs shows up. I jump into her, only, she's not her, she's a robot, and what's more, she contains the soul of Alison Larsen."
Paul whistled. If I were him, I would have whistled, too.
“Yeah. And then I live through her grisly death, bullet to the throat and post-mortem torture by 8-year-olds, then wake up and put on a goddamned cocktail dress and hightail it over to the Art Museum before Brad starts killing everybody. A body swap here, a body swap there, Brad takes over and the next thing I know, I'm lying on a cold slab of museum marble with my brains hanging out of my skull. The hotel flips out, the whole place goes up in nuclear hellfire, and I find myself here, talking to you."
“Wait a minute,” Paul said. “You mean our physical body is dying?"
“If not already dead."
“Uh-oh."
“What? What do you mean by uh-oh?"
“It's only a theory,” Paul said, “but I was beginning to surmise the only thing keeping me here, in this place between Death and the Next, was that your physical body was still alive."
“And what's Next?"
“I think we're about to find out."
As if on cue, the first mushroom cloud appeared over a tiny island in the deep, hazy distance. It looked unreal, like cheap animation.
And then another. Closer this time, less cartoon-like. A hotel out in the distance exploded upon impact. Then another-each one more like an angry geyser of steam than an H-bomb, but burning everything nonetheless.
“Maybe they'll miss us."
“I don't think so,” Paul said.
Another nuclear blast, even closer. I felt the air sizzle around us. This was how I'd always imagined a nuclear attack to be, way back when I was a grade-schooler and forced to tuck myself under my desk during an air raid siren.
Naturally, I instinctually understood that all this carnage and destruction was merely my brain's representation of itself dying, shutting down. The same creative powers I'd harnessed to build the Brain Hotel were now turned against me, showing me my own personal apocalypse with the very things that had always terrified me the most. This knowledge did not help me from being scared out of my mind.
Paul said, “In case I don't see you again, it was nice working with you."
“Me, too,” I said.
Finally, as I'd feared, the hotel complex directly across the way imploded and funneled up high into the sky, like white foam from a faucet shooting in the wrong direction. That was too close, I thought. And the air became alive with electricity and burning and everything burnt out like a photographic negative…
That was what it was like for me to die from a bullet to the head.
Twenty-Five
Soul Gun
I woke up sometime later. The sun hadn't come up yet, but I could feel myself in bed. I had the blankets pulled up all the way over my head. I was freezing. Who cranked the air conditioning in this room? And the bed felt like a sheet of cold steel.
Which, of course, it was.
I was lying on a slab in the morgue.
All I had witnessed countless times in the past had, at last, come to pass for me: I was dead. And my discorporated soul was hanging around the flesh, as if it had nothing better to do. I tried calling out to Paul, but I heard no response. Was he in the Next Place already? I hoped so. Even cold-blooded killers needed a rest.
So. This was death. Visited many times, never wanted to live there. When I'd died the first time, and Robert had absorbed my soul, I had only been hanging around my body for an hour or so. My flesh was still relatively warm, and rigor mortis was a long ways down the road. Now, however, I could feel my physical body turn traitor. It longed to crawl in some cool earth and break down, chemically, into nutrients to feed future plant life. I wanted to carry on thinking and being and knowing and learning. We were at cross purposes. But I wasn't going to give up without a fight.
I just prayed I would still be able to do a resurrection.
Granted, I never tried it on myself. Performing one took a lot out of me when I was alive-God only knows what it would do now I was dead. Truly, completely, utterly dead, I mean.
Many souls have asked me what it's like to perform a resurrection. I don't know if they're curious about the process, or if they're trying to glom some information for their own purposes.
Nevertheless, my answer is always the same: I honestly don't know. Bringing a soul back from the dead is an art that was passed down to me from Robert, and I suppose he'd learned it from the man who'd done the same for him. Maybe it went back centuries-dare I say back to the time of Christ, when he worked his mojo on poor old Lazarus? Was someone around then to learn the trick? And were they able to describe it?
If pressed to explain it, I guess I would say it's like struggling to remember something. You don't quite know what you're doing when you're “racking your brain,” but clearly, some kind of mechanical process is in effect. Then, all of sudden, the memory pops back. Or, it doesn't.
That's the same deal with resurrection.
I laid there and tried to remember how to raise somebody-namely, myself-from the dead. I ran through every possible train of thought: My own death and rebirth; the first time I brought somebody else back, seeing Brad Larsen, dead in the muddy waters of Woody Creek…
And then, it worked. I immediately forgot exactly how it worked, but it did.
I started to come back to life.
After a while, I sat up, and the sheet dropped from my face. Boy, did I feel like a lump of shit. This was a hundred times worse than the worst hangover or flu I'd ever known, easy. My physical body was not happy with me one bit. My physical body wanted to check in at Hotel Deep Six as soon as possible.
I threw one leg over the table, then the other, then slid my ass off, landed on my feet, and managed to stay there for a second. Then my entire naked form collapsed and smacked into the cold tile floor. Fortunately, my body was too involved in its own internal suffering to acknowledge the blow.
Eventually, I got to my feet and surveyed my surroundings. Definitely a morgue. I needed to find the ME's office, and hope he kept a spare pair of pants around, or at the very least, hospital scrubs. Maybe they even had my own clothes around here somewhere, sealed up in a plastic baggie. I opened up a couple of drawers, but didn't find a thing. Just a lot of doctor toys-cotton balls, bottles of rubbing alcohol, tongue suppressors, scalpels.