Duane Swierczynski - Secret Dead Men

But it wasn't Kennedy who got it first. A large chunk of ceiling exploded right above a group of souls gathered by the doorway-including Doug and Old Tom. Then, to rub salt into the wound, the floor beneath them erupted upwards a second later. I could only assume that everything-plaster, bricks, souls-met halfway, violently. Hopefully, the stoner bastard never knew what hit him.

I bolted for the stairway. The booming from above pounded closer and closer. I quickly decided the stairs were not an ideal escape route. I spun, and the wall I was now facing shattered into a million pieces, flying debris cutting Kevin Kennedy into an equal number of individual pieces. I tucked myself into a ball on the lobby carpet, waiting for something to rip me apart, too. The only mystery was the direction.

I heard plenty of explosions, but nothing so much as a flying brick touched me.

After a minute or so, I dared to stand up and look. I was still standing on a patch of the lobby carpet, but the carpet was positioned in the middle of a vast field of green, reaching into the distance. No debris, no bodies. Then again, souls didn't have bodies, I supposed. Just astral perceptions of bodies. Every last astral perception, it seemed, had been blown to smithereens.

The Brain Hotel was gone. But what was this surrounding me? I'd never built any kind of landscape around the hotel. I was never a big fan of mowing lawns, Brain-conjured or not.

There was more, too-another hotel complex a mile away, across a green field-a superhotel, the Las Vegas variety. Behind it, the fields rolled outward into a blue infinity, occasionally interrupted by patches of gold lines and other, hotel-like structures. The more I stared, the more I could make out another piece of land, across the blue infinity. An island. Where the hell was I?

“I was wondering when you'd arrive,” a voice said. I snapped my head around. It was Paul After.

“Brad told me you were dead,” I said.

“I've been dead as long as you've known me."

Even I was getting tired of the dead cracks. “Do you know where we are?"

Paul puffed up his chest, and started to look around, as if he were a tour guide. “The best I can figure is that this is the place between death and whatever lies beyond it. I'm not even sure how long I've been here. Do you know?"

“Not too long. I think it's been about a day since Brad told me he offed you."

“Oh. Right.” Paul's eyebrows furrowed. “Brad was pretty pissed. Of course, he had every reason to be."

“So you knew you were one and the same?"

“No, no,” Paul insisted. “I never lied to you. I didn't realize who I was until I was sent to this place. It gave me a sense of clarity I've never felt before. That's when I realized I was- am -nothing more than an invented personality. I was John Paul Bafoures, criminal mastermind, and Brad was the normal, upright, tax-paying citizen. It was brilliant. Most killers invent a cover, some ordinary boring life, to avoid detection; Brad Larsen actually lived it. I was the aberration."

“He made you up?"

Yep,” Paul said. “And I finally remembered what I did to piss him off."

“Spit in his Cheerios one morning?"

“Last July, Brad decided to turn himself into the Witness Protection Program-to protect Alison, and start over, with a clean slate, I presume. Or maybe start up business someplace else. He decided to erase me, pretend I didn't exist. Naturally, this didn't make me happy. So I sent an order to have him killed."

“You what? But you were Brad."

“No, I was part of Brad. A distinct personality within his own. I wanted revenge. Don't forget-I was a ruthless, bloodthirsty killer. Brad made me that way."

“How did you pull it off?"

“One night, when Brad was sleeping, I took over his body, and made a quick phone call to Las Vegas. Asked an associate of ours to arrange a quick assassination. I suppose he picked this Ray Loogan guy-an absolute nobody."

“Then why was the paycheck half a million?” I asked.

“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…