Dying for a Living (A Jesse Sullivan Novel) (3 page)

My colors have never matched Ally’s, Brinkley’s, or anyone who’d accompanied me in the room during a replacement. Lane too, I imagine, would be a more vibrant hue if I ever got a good look at him. The point was I seemed a welcome home for blue flame since I was always blue flame. Not the cold blue of furniture or buildings, more like a sparkly blue. Electric blue.

With Reynolds’s flame drawn into my own, it gave his red-warm fire room enough to burn. But there was a special spark I was looking for, something I had to find inside him and keep from being washed down the swirling vortex.

The elevator opening and Ally shouting to the paramedics seemed like sounds underwater, distant and muffled as I focused harder on Reynolds.

“Hurry, Jesse,” she said, so soft she could have been whispering.

A hot-cold chill settled into the muscles in my back and coiled around my navel like an invisible snake as I pushed my own flame further into Reynolds. I slid through him with urgency, aware I was running out of time.

There—a spark where our flames danced around each other. Against the line showing the division, I pushed hard. Reynolds’s chest rose suddenly, jerking as he gasped, like gasoline thrown on the blaze.

But even though I scooped Reynolds’s precious spark out of the vortex, the vortex didn’t just close. Somebody still had to go through that death drain. Unfortunately, that somebody had to be me.

So I exhaled one last breath and gave myself completely to the waiting darkness.

Chapter 2

I
recognized the ornate tile above Kirk’s head: soft, creamy swirls and the smell of carnations. We were at Mt. Olivet’s funeral home in the preparation room where Kirk always fixed me up. When death spits me back out the other side, I’m far from pretty. Worse, I always come off rigor mortis the way an addict comes off a high—nauseated, woozy, and hateful toward the world.

“Be still,” his voice commanded.

My mortician Kirk was well over six feet tall, bald, and his skin the color of pure cocoa beans. His square frame loomed over me, casting a long dark shadow as I lay stretched out on one of those doctor examination beds, plush with a slight incline.

Kirk’s face was a mask of intention, while a thin applicator brush jutted at my eye from one hand. He was an artist with a canvas. Who was I to interrupt? I adjusted my neck to its original position and closed my eyes again. His soft brush moved over my closed eyelids, lips, then down each cheek. His light touch relaxed me.

“That smells good,” I said, trying not to fidget despite the pain in my back.

“Organic Rosemary Tint,” he replied. “It will compensate for your pale complexion until your circulation improves.”

Real dead people don’t care about their cosmetics. However, with developing Necronite-mortician relationships, a whole line of organic cosmetics for customers like me had spawned. Let’s just say that no amount of Maybelline would make me look okay after a replacement. Though I have a really fast metabolism and some regeneration-healing skills, I still need help putting parts of me back together. This was also why I needed Kirk. Unlike any doctor, he was used to working with stiffs, so I could trust him to fix me up at any stage of decomposition, no matter the damage my body took in a replacement. The hospital was responsible for making sure all my organs, etc. were accounted for—and Kirk was responsible for the rest.

“Did you see anything strange?” I asked.

He paused, the brush hovering over my bottom lip. “Your heart beating in my hands is strange.”

“No, I mean anything unusual,” I said. “Anything you don’t usually see?”

He considered my question then returned to painting my face. “No. Why?”

I thought about the strange electrical problems I’d had lately: coffee makers, light bulbs and then the secretary’s computer, all exploding on their own. That wasn’t normal for me and something about it scared me a little—the way missing my period or losing a wallet scared me—not the mishap itself so much as the possibility of greater mayhem.

“I was just wondering if you found any brain-eating slugs. Got to watch out for those.”

“No, nothing like that,” Kirk said with a warm grin and the snap of a latex glove. “All finished.”

Kirk packed up his black case, arranging the box of gloves, varied brushes and cosmetics just so. He pulled off the other glove with a second snap and threw it in the waste bin. The fact that I could turn my head at all said I wasn’t “zombie-shuffle” sore. I asked Kirk about it.

He turned his wrist over to read his watch. “You’ve been alive for almost four hours.”

That explained why the rigor mortis wasn’t so bad. My cells would’ve had time to push some of the calcium out and lessen the muscle contraction, but the only cure for rigor mortis was a hot bath, massage, lots of gentle stretching and most importantly, time.

“What was my D.T.?” I meant “down-time” or “death-time.” Necronites stay dead—no heartbeats, no breathing, actual decomposition and all that—until our brains reboot. Then we experience the coma state, in this case, the four-hour stint Kirk mentioned, while our bodies heal enough to support themselves and regain consciousness. Scientific minds are politely calling this whole process NRD, or Necronitic Regenerative Disorder. No hocus pocus here, folks!

Kirk looked at the ceiling as if calculating in his head. “About fifteen hours. We’re coming up on 8:00 A.M.”

“Tuesday?”

“That’s the one.”

I loved it when that happened, when I slept through the night and woke up at a normal hour. It made the death-life transition easier.

“Where’s Ally?”

He wiped the bristles of a dirty makeup brush clean with a towel. “Gone since she delivered your body last night. Brinkley’s here to take you home.”

I fell against the bed and faked a coma.

“That shit won’t work on me,” a familiar voice said and I didn’t feel the least bit compelled to quit playing dead. I’d rather be dead than deal with Brinkley any day.

“Get up.”

I groaned and dragged myself from Kirk’s table. My legs instantly stiffened as they hit the floor. Groaning, I stretched each limb before rolling my eyes up to meet Brinkley’s.

“Have I ever told you how much fun you are?” I asked.

“More than once.” Brinkley was just a tad shorter than Kirk with the same wide shoulders and early signs of a beer gut, bodies like old football stars. I thought they knew each other from past military days and that’s why Brinkley set him up as my mortician when we relocated from St. Louis. Whatever his past, Brinkley was more like a cop than a soldier now, given his work with FBRD—The Federal Bureau of Regenerative Deaths—but his graying hair and sour face said it all. He’d seen some things in the world that he hadn’t liked and he’d been dealing with them ever since.

I often felt like I was one of those things.

“Do you want to know something really funny?” he asked, entering the softly lit room. He was in jeans today and a collared T-shirt. Even when it was ninety degrees outside, I’d never seen him in anything but pants. I wonder if his legs were as pasty white as the rest of him. “I just got another batch of your reviews.”

Brinkley waved a thin stack of post-replacement survey cards at me before tossing them for me to catch. They were held together by a rubber band and their rough edges each sported a different color ink and handwriting.

“My personal favorite and I quote,” he said, through tight lips. “Ms. Sullivan is like a human Chihuahua who barks at anything that moves.”

“I don’t bark.” I flipped through the cards.

“I believe it’s a comment on your constant sarcasm,” Brinkley said and slipped his hands into his pockets. “Not that any of us have had the pleasure of experiencing it.”

“My commentary is not constant,” I argued. I flicked the card. “That woman is just mad because I called her a hoarder. She had, like, two million creepy dolls.”

Kirk grunted, suppressing a laugh. “What kind?”

“Porcelain—and some of them clowns,” I answered and tried to get a crick out of my neck by stretching it long, left then right. My neck muscles ached like I’d spent the night head-banging. “If I really was a mean person I would’ve said something about that stain on your pants.”

All of our eyes went to Brinkley’s crotch and the dark stain about four inches below his gun.

I arched an eyebrow. “I could say—”

Brinkley stopped me, ears bright red. “That—” He refused to look at his crotch, which resulted in his pointing at it. “—is your fault.”

“I’d remember making you piss blood.”

His tone turned dangerously even. “When we picked you up from the hospital, they missed a piece of glass. When I pulled it out, you squirted on me,” he said, jaw still tight. “It would seem even your corpse is a sarcastic little shit.”

Kirk, whose eyes had merely gone back and forth between us as we argued, gave a polite cough.

“If you’ll excuse me,” Kirk said, squeezing my shoulder. Kirk and Brinkley did a male nod thing before it was just Brinkley and I left standing in the back room. We’ve worked together for the last seven years, yet I still found being alone with him awkward. Maybe awkward wasn’t the right word—uncomfortable.

“I’m scared to even ask how it went with Mr. Reynolds,” he asked, relaxing his shoulders a little. “I hope you gave him a nice impression of Necronites. We pay him to make you look good.”

“I saved his life,” I said. “If that even counts.”

“That’s only part of the job.”

“The hard part,” I mumbled. “The part I don’t even get thanked for.”

“You have to comfort them. People need to feel safe,” he said, as if he hadn’t said this fifty times before.

“They aren’t safe.” I thought of all the ungrateful jerks I’ve had to deal with. How many lives had I saved? Sixty-seven. Sixty-seven, yet I could count on one hand the people who’d actually thanked me for it. “If they were safe they wouldn’t need me to begin with.” I made a big show of flipping through the survey cards without actually looking at them.

“If you don’t improve your people skills, I’ll have to fire you.”

“Bullshit.”

“You’re replaceable.”

“Am not,” I said. Sure, I dreamed about quitting my job twenty times a day, but dreaming about the clever things I’d say to Brinkley at the moment of regaining my freedom was not the same as having him threaten me with unemployment. “It’s not like it’s raining zombies or anything.”

“Don’t use that word!” His anger was back, unfurling just as fast as mine.

“Fine. Necronites are like 2 in 100 people. You’ve managed to convince less than half of us saps to be death-replacement agents. Act like you can just call up an old friend to do my job.
Puh
-lease.”

Silence filled the room, amplified by the whirl of the air conditioner seeping through the overhead vents. I’m not so good with silence so I just kept talking.

“And if I was so replaceable, I wouldn’t work twice as much as the other agents.”

His eyes narrowed. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

“I mean that I have to do twice as many replacement jobs as Cindy. And Cooper weasels his way out of a replacement every five minutes.”

“I’m not their boss. I’m your boss.”

Too late to turn back now. “The point is I work harder and I get yelled at more. That’s the definition of unfair.”

Brinkley’s face went from white to red. “You don’t know how good you’ve got it.”

“Clearly,” I huffed. Wasn’t I complaining enough?

“Cooper is on a military contract,” Brinkley said. “He goes where they want, when they want. He doesn’t get a say about where he eats or sleeps. You and Cindy are both hired on as personal consultants. You should appreciate that.”

I clucked, indignant. “Why?”

“Cindy and Cooper have clocked five times as many hours as you in community service—in interviews, hospitals, police stations,” he continued, waving his hand. “They do that to protect you. All of you. A Necronite’s rights are void upon death in Utah and Alabama. They amended their state constitutions saying that once you die the first time, you don’t deserve rights anymore. You are no longer a person. What if they do that here in Tennessee? The bill is already drafted. And I can’t even trust you to behave in a five minute interview.”

“Because you think I’m a social cripple. I don’t know why,” I said. I pointed at the feedback card on top. “This person gave me a three.”

“Out of ten.”

“Isn’t one the best?” I asked.

“Ten is best,” he said. “And ten years is what you promised me.”

The temperature shifted. An imaginary cube of ice slid down my spine and Brinkley’s eyes grew dangerously steady. When he went real still, real quiet like this, it freaked me out. If he were a cat, his tail would be flicking, signaling that he was about to pounce.

When I didn’t answer, he moved closer. His large body blocked the light from the hallway, making the room darker and smaller. I was trapped.

He placed his hands on his hips making himself look even bigger. His voice dropped. “After what I did for you, Sullivan, you owe me.”