B.C. Johnson: Deadgirl

“No,” I said. I tried to wipe the blood on the front of my skirt, “No.”

“It didn’t happen like this, did it?” Zack asked me, the sad puppy-dog tone breaking my heart.

“No,” I said, and I felt my traitor’s voice breaking. “You held my hand last time. We watched some dumb action movie. You kissed me inside the theater in front of everyone. You told everyone we should date.”

I laughed, despite the catch in my throat, “You polled the audience.”

“What did they say?”

“Most people said we looked cute together,” I said. “One guy called you gay.”

“What did you say?”

“You know what I said,” I said. “I kissed you back.”

Zack smiled. “Yeah. I thought so. That’s much better. Better than this.”

I nodded and felt tears spill over and slide down my cheek.

Benny turned around, and Morgan too, but both of them faded into encroaching darkness. Morgan’s mouth was open—she tried to talk before the shadows stole her away. I heard Wanda make a little squeak behind me, and when I turned around, she was gone, too.

“Why are they leaving?”

Zack smiled again. A melancholy smile. An angel’s smile, I realized—beautiful, wise, but infinitely sad. Like he knew the course of the universe and wept at its passing.

“We’re all leaving,” Zack said, and leaned forward.

When his lips touched my forehead, I knew. They weren’t warm, they weren’t solid. It felt like wind brushing the hair out of my eyes. It felt nothing like the kiss in the movie theater. It felt nothing like the heady rush, the warmth of his lips, the taste of his sweat.

“I’m dying?”

The rest of the van faded away into darkness, until Zack and I sat on a disembodied bench seat in the abyss. My feet dangled over nothing. Maybe everything. I took a deep, rattling breath, waiting for his answer.

“Yes.”

“I love you,” I said.

“I know,” he said, and kissed my forehead again. Nothing this time. Not even the gentle breeze. “Stand up, Luce.”

I did. My feet touched asphalt this time. The abyss was gone—we floated in a pool of yellow light, in an alley behind a dead office building. He held me to him, like dancing, and then he dipped me. We stayed there for a long time, him holding me just above the ground, looking down at me.

Then it wasn’t Zack anymore. Just a black shadow in the shape of Zack. The shape I loved so much. He let me down the last foot to the asphalt, slowly, gently, cradling my broken body draining rapidly of strength. When he set me down and stood up straight, I could barely even feel the jagged rock beneath me. I felt nothing, in fact.

“Buh…”

I couldn’t even form the word before the shadow winked out of existence.

I had no more tears to cry, I realized. Nothing but the slow pulse of my blood leaking out onto a dirty parking space. Then I went cold. Then I died.

Light. Welling. Heat.

Fire.

Hell?

No .

Warm.

Content?

Drained away.

Drained away like a gas tank, like a pile of firewood.

A hungry flame took everything in its greedy mouth and swallowed it whole.

My eyes fluttered open again.

“What?” I whispered.

Overhead, the baleful yellow light glared down at me. I felt my fingers curl against the asphalt, raking my fingertips with jagged lines of pain. My butt felt flattened and sore—my spine felt like it had been stretched over a pile of broken glass. The back of my head, resting against the ground, felt raw and sensitive, and every tiny motion of my body sent an ache through my skull.

Blue above me. Daytime blue . The golden light wasn’t the streetlight—it was too warm now, amber instead of perverse yellow. A cloud floated in the bright blue sky just above me, in the shape of a rabbit, or maybe one of those fat little pug dogs. I blinked. I raised my hands to rub my eyes against the glaring light.

I sucked in a breath and touched my stomach. I sat up, ignoring a racking stiff pain in my back, and looked down.

My shirt was still torn and stained with blood. I grabbed the edges of the hole and tore. The fabric ripped easily, revealing my bare stomach. Brown, dried blood flaked off of my stomach with the movement, but most of it clung tightly to my skin. I shuddered and probed at my abdomen with trembling fingers. I felt no sudden stab of pain, no aching sickness.

I touched where the hole that took my life should be. Smooth skin, beneath the blood. No scar, no puckered skin, no gaping maw. Just nothing. Just me.

Alive?

My eyes began to adjust to the day, and I turned my head to either side of me. Just parking lot, the office building with its empty, dark windows. In the distance, over the hedges that lined the parking lot, I could see chunks of the Set’s landscape against the sky.

I sat up, slowly at first, expecting some rush of agony or wave of dizziness, but I felt nothing. Nothing beyond the norm, anyway. I touched my stomach again, ran my fingers harder across the skin. Trying to find the pain. Some part of me wanted it to be there. Some sign, other than the blood, that it all wasn’t some dream.

But I felt nothing, other than my fingers and the crusted blood and a nagging terror that I was about to wake up.

I checked my pockets—I had my phone, my wallet, my keys. If I’d been robbed, someone had done a pretty crappy job. I turned my phone over and pressed the menu button. The screen didn’t light up. Dead. I made a sound in the back of my throat that I only just recognized as a stifled laugh.

Without it, I didn’t even know the time. I stared up at the sky, trying to read it like I knew what I was doing. I guessed noon by the height of the sun, but I’d never even been a Brownie as a little girl. I liked camping and the outdoors, but a wild trailblazer I was not. I insisted on an inflatable mattress every time, in fact.

I stood, again expecting the wash of dizziness. Nothing. As I cleared the hedges blocking my view, I could see the gigantic parking lot encircling the Set was only mildly full. Saturday morning wasn’t the busiest time—it certainly wasn’t the chaotic swarm of a Friday night.

Something glittered on the asphalt when I moved my head. I looked down. A small revolver sat on the ground, looking pathetic and cast-off. It didn’t even frighten me, I realized—in fact, I smirked. So much for the dream theory.

I knelt, and my bare knee scraped the asphalt. I barely noticed. Against the advice of every TV cop show I’d ever seen, I picked up the little gun and turned it in my hand.

It looked old, out-of-repair. It looked like a dad’s gun, absconded by a punk kid. My old shooting range sessions with my dad, another self-defense insistence, came back to me without too much trouble. I slid the small metal catch toward the grip, and the cylinder popped open.

I pushed the ejection rod, and the bullets all clattered onto the asphalt. Except one. One made a bright, hollow tinging sound before it came to rest. Five little cartridges stood out against the blacktop—the sixth was empty. Sans-bullet.

I touched my stomach again. I pinched the empty cartridge between two fingers and held it up to my eyes. Small, brass, insignificant. It didn’t even smell like powder anymore. I dropped it into my coat pocket, scattered the rest of the bullets with my foot, and kicked the revolver toward the hedges. It didn’t make it, but I didn’t care. The urge to hide my own murder wasn’t particularly strong.

I started walking. I knew I should stop, reflect, think. Check myself again, check more thoroughly. I heard about shock—I knew some people could keep fighting with their guts hanging out or whatever, but this didn’t seem to fit. I didn’t think shock made you hallucinate that you’d healed completely and survived both a gunshot wound and an entire night of unsupervised blood loss.