Dying for a Living (A Jesse Sullivan Novel) (13 page)

Ally rushed in then, mouthing ‘Sorry’ to Dr. York just before handing me a Starbucks cup. Dr. York graced her with a patient smile and motioned for her to sit down. I pulled out the chair on the opposite side of me, furthest from the door.

“Death-replacement is the greatest scientific discovery of the twenty-first century,” a doctor with coke bottle glasses said as the video rolled on. His eyes were magnified by those thick lenses and looked twice the average size. He had this habit of flicking his tongue over his lips between words. “NRD opened a Pandora’s box for neurologists.”

I huffed. “Yes, just equate us with a legend of how all suffering entered the world.”

The announcer continued, “…not all of those with NRD choose to be death-replacement agents. Most fear announcing their condition to their communities because of discrimination, possible violence…”

I was dozing off when Ally nudged me. I reluctantly sat up straighter and focused my attention on the TV. A pretty blond schoolteacher appeared. The camera panned over her classroom before zooming in on her as she wrote on the board, explaining something. The children sat rapt in their seats, hands neatly folded. Clearly, this was staged.

The following clip was her again, post-mortem and racked with rigor mortis. She moved with the shuffle-step most replacement agents have before a good rub down and steam.

“I know this might be frightening,” the teacher said. Her neck was twisted oddly to the side, looking pale and bloody. “But I’m perfectly harmless.”

“Oh, come on, this isn’t muscular dystrophy,” I said. “She just needs a bath.” That woman didn’t have to look that way, which is why her pulling the sympathy card irritated me.

Ally pinched my leg as several people glanced my way. Dr. York was one of them.

A social worker spoke now as a child stood beside him. “Most of their families turn them away. They can’t handle the adjustment of raising a special-needs child.”

Ally leaned toward me, keeping her voice low. “How are Necronite children special-needs? As long as you don’t kill them, they are no different.”

I smiled at her, but my mind had begun to wander at the idea of Necronite children and their families.

“And sometimes the children must be removed from the home for safety reasons. A child who can be tortured to death, and then resurrect, attracts the wrong kind of foster parent.”

The video gave a parting shot of a mother who’d discovered her six-year-old daughter, thought dead after drowning in a river, was NRD-positive. “I’m just so happy she’s alive,” she cried. “It’s a miracle.”

That’s not how my mother took the news, let me tell you. Yes, when I woke up from my very first death to find Brinkley recruiter extraordinaire, I did make one last call to my mother. I am not sure why I did this. I think a part of me wished that since her child-molester husband was dead, maybe I could repair my relationship with her. Maybe she’d even thank me for rescuing her from a perverted husband, because maybe she’d just been too scared to kick him to the curb herself. I was willing to forgive her for everything, if only I could come home to her and Danny.

But you know what she said?

My daughter is dead.

I even thought maybe she was just confused, grief-stricken and thought I was some jerk pranking her. So I laid it all out for her: NRD, my regeneration, and that I didn’t have to become an agent right away. I could just come home and finish school if I wanted. Brinkley made that clear even though he threatened to expose me as an arsonist and murderer if I didn’t work for him in at least some capacity in the near future. But my mother wasn’t confused.

—don’t call here again, Jesse.

The lights came on as the film’s credits rolled on the black screen. A few people clapped, so I did too, just to get Ally to quit elbowing me in the ribs. Dr. York resumed his position in front. My stomach flopped, knowing it’d be my time to talk soon. I shifted in my seat, suddenly unable to get comfortable.

Dr. York broke the silence. “Before we turn it over to our guests, does anyone have any questions about the video?” Dr. York capitalized on this pause. “Allow me to introduce Ms. Jesse Sullivan and Captain Gloria Jackson.” Dr. York gestured for us to join him at the front of the room. Ally had to push me from my seat. I walked as smoothly as possible to Dr. York’s side, careful to not look like one of those shuffling weirdoes on that horrible video despite the fact I was still sore. I couldn’t do anything about my gauze wrapped neck though. I was sure that gave them ideas.

“Ms. Sullivan is a resident here in Nashville and one of the three death-replacement agents serving the Davidson County area.” People clapped. I think Ally started it. “Captain Gloria Jackson also works in Nashville. She collaborates with several Federal Bureaus, as well as with the local authorities to solve cases.”

I said the line Dr. York had taught me to say. I tried not to sound too robotic. “We are here to answer any questions you might have about replacement agents or death-management in general.”

Almost every hand shot up. Just great. Gloria looked like she was still pulling herself together, so I took the initiative. “Uh, you.” I’d pointed at the person closest to me, a black woman with beautiful coiled braids piled on top of her head, but scary neon green nails, curling like freakish talons.

“How do you decide who lives and dies?”

“I don’t,” I said. “I get told who to save. The FBRD issues us handlers to ensure all our replacements are federally compliant. I show up for work like everyone else.”

I picked another hand. “What about people in a burning building? Wouldn’t you save them?”

“I don’t randomly walk past burning buildings,” I said. Ally made a face suggesting I’d missed the point so I tried to answer him again. “If I came across someone who just happened to be dying, yes I would save them, if that’s what you meant.”

An Asian man with glasses on the end of his nose went next. “My wife is sick with cancer and I was told she cannot be saved. Why can’t you save her?”

I tried to avoid the personalization of the question. If I didn’t this could get ugly real quick.

“Unfortunately, replacement agents can’t heal people. If I were to sit with your wife until just before she died and then replace her, it’d keep her from going—wherever—but she’d still be stuck in a body that’ll kill her. She’ll die again almost as soon as she’s replaced.”

He wet his lips. “I understand it would only buy more time, but—”

“Which is why health replacements aren’t allowed,” I said. “It’s a waste of time.”

That came out wrong. I knew it as soon as I said it. The air burned hot around my face.

“I mean, because I lose a day or two also, you know, being dead. In that time, I could miss the opportunity to save someone else.” I wet my lips and chose the woman who’d cried during the video. I was counting her on to be nice. “Yes?”

“I don’t understand how A.M.P.s work,” she said.

Several hands went down, suggesting this was a hot topic, though not an easy one to explain.

I gestured to Gloria whose first reaction was to force an awkward smile. “Once the government ruled out NRD as a contagious disease, or biological warfare, those with NRD were taken into protective custody. While in custody, military scientists conducted numerous tests, and death-replacement is one of the talents they discovered. Some researchers believe an electrical transference between the magnetic fields surrounding humans occurs. When their magnetic fields reverse, it prevents the clients from dying, but takes the life of the death replacement agent instead.”

Everyone leaned forward now, and I felt like we should have flashlights and toasty marshmallows for this story. “In the light of this discovery, the government saw limitless possibilities in military development, but with so few cases of NRD, they sought to replicate the phenomenon. This is how A.M.P.s were made.”

I turned to Gloria and tried to remember all the things she’d told me about her experience as a soldier turned A.M.P.—which wasn’t much—only enough to suggest how horrific the ordeal had been. Of course, if you’d asked me, anything with needles and medical testing was torture.

Gloria hadn’t quite erased the pained expression on her face when Dr. York decided to step in and help with the medical aspect. “The most significant difference in a brain with NRD and a brain without is magnetite. They have a significant quantity of magnetite in their cerebral cortexes.”

“What is magnetite?” a man asked.

“It’s a ferrimagnetic mineral that some animals have in their bodies. It helps them sense magnetic fields. Birds have it in their beaks and they use it to fly between the north and south magnetic poles in the winter. It is basically a natural magnet.”

The military got the bright idea to shove a huge wad of magnetite into their soldiers’ brains. Mostly it killed people or severely brain damaged them. Survivors became A.M.P.s. They can’t resurrect or anything because they don’t really have NRD, but the magnetic material helps them read magnetic fields and make predictions. This skill is further enhanced with a little trick called remote-viewing. This seems to be the only real outcome of the experiments, their ability to read patterns in the world and know what will happen based on where things are going.

Dr. York gestured with his hands. “We believe A.M.P.s read the Earth’s magnetic field and the magnetic fields surrounding people, and that’s how they help the replacement agents target deaths. Death is a measurable disturbance in the magnetic field.”

“But how do you read the fields?” a woman insisted, smacking the gum in her mouth like a cow with a wad of grass.

Gloria explained but didn’t look up from her polished shoes. Oh, G. Why does she agree to do this if she hates it so? “In the nineties, the military conducted ESP research to see if they could develop psychic warfare. AMPs like myself were taught to use remote-viewing, a skill established during that research. I personally use drawing as a medium to transfer the images.”

Dr. York said my name softly as if to steer the attention away from Gloria. “Can you explain to them how your NRD wakes you up?”

“Sure.” I inhaled trying to shift the growing pain out of my muscles. I hated standing in one place. “Have any of you ever jerked awake when you were almost asleep? You know, like you’re dreaming that you miss a step, and then you jerk and wake up?”

Several heads bobbed in unison with the soft murmurs.

“That’s called a myoclonic jerk. Your body jerks because your brain, mistaking your slowed breathing for dying, sent an electro-impulse through your body to cause your muscles, including your heart, to contract. That jolt is meant to wake you up. With NRD it’s like that. Once we’ve died, our brain starts sending a bombardment of electro-impulses through the body to wake us up. It’s why we need our brains to resurrect. No brain equals no pulsing. Neurologists still aren’t sure why our brains do this, which is why it is called Necronitic Regenerative Disorder.”

“How long do you stay dead?” The green-nailed woman asked.

“It depends. The amount of damage the body suffered during death determines how long we’ll stay dead before our systems—circulatory, respiratory and so on—respond to the pulses.”

“Why does the Church hate you?” someone asked. Off-topic, much?

I grinned. “I think they’re jealous Jesus isn’t the only one coming back from the dead these days.”

This got some laughs. Too bad it didn’t last.

A man in the back who reclined in his chair, arms resting on his lap spoke with an accent. He had the puffed up chest of a cop. “Last night, two kids were gunned down near 11th and Vine. Three days before that, a woman was raped and then stabbed to death over on Chester Ave. I find it hard to believe that replacement agents are doing the world such a service when incidents like this keep happening.”

“There are only three of us,” I said. “And I can’t be everywhere at once. Not to mention that when I die, I lose a few days of my life. So even if I stayed dead every possible moment, I could only make about a hundred replacements a year and be completely fried out of my mind.”

The cop looked like he couldn’t care less about my mental stability. He grabbed the edge of his table. “You make up 2% of the world population. That figures out to like 120 million people. Together, you could save millions, maybe a billion people a year.”

“It doesn’t work that way.”

“Why?” he said. His face was as red as mine now. “Because you don’t feel like being a stiff for a few days?”

My voice got louder. “No, because your math is shitty.”

His mouth opened to say something else ridiculous but I cut him off.

“I don’t have 2% of the population backing me, giving me this valiant life purpose. It’s not like some glorious police force where we trade battle scar stories. I’ve had conversations with maybe six replacement agents in my whole seven years of death-replacing. You’re basing your numbers on the world population, but that’s inaccurate. In most Middle Eastern and African countries, your head is cut off as soon as they find out you’ve got NRD.”

Before he could open his mouth again, I barreled on.

“Japan and China are the only other countries that have a death-replacement system comparable to ours. So you need to cut your numbers down to just those populations. Then cut your number smaller because most NRD-positives don’t know they have NRD and of the ones that do, even fewer of them become agents. You want to know why?”