Authors: Cliff Hicks
He looked at his car and sighed, terrified that it wouldn’t turn over. Fortunately, his Chevy Nova started up fine this time. Perhaps it was thankful that it would no longer have to hear his fiancée, his ex-fiancée, bitch about how he should replace it. He would have except getting the money together had been a bit of a challenge. The behemoth rumbled out into the street and Jake decided to turn on the radio to try and take his mind off of things. Suddenly, The Beatles began blaring “All You Need Is Love” out of the speakers. The radio, it seemed, had no such loyalties. Jake’s eyes rolled closed again and he drew in a deep breath, reaching over to turn the knob and turn the radio off. It snapped off in his hand. Jake paused, nodded a bit to himself acceptingly (as if this was the only possible thing that could have happened when he turned on the radio), then pulled the car over to the side of the road in front of an elderly rest home, leaving the car running as he got out.
As a dozen senior citizens watched from their porch stoop, Jake moved back, opened his trunk, pulled out his tire iron, slammed his trunk, moved back to his car and smashed in his radio. He swung that tire iron three or four times to bash in the radio until it stopped making any sound. There was a squelch at the first strike, as if protesting the abuse, before it fell deathly silent as Jake’s last few blows crushed it in. He tossed the tire iron on the seat next to him as he sat back in the driver’s seat and lifted a hand up to wave to the senior citizens, who were staring at him in mild shock. At the sign of the wave, though, their automatic reactions kicked in, and they waved back on pure reflex. He started up his car and continued along his way.
He maneuvered the car through the streets, pulling into a fast food joint. He needed some kind of lunch, and he didn’t particularly feel like cooking. He moved inside and joined the long queue, the line that would not die, the never-ending line. It looked like there were only a dozen or so people in line, but he could practically feel the hours melting away as he stood there, motionless. After what seemed like an eternity, one person moved. Then another. Jake felt as though that by the time he got to the counter, food itself would be obsolete. Eventually, he got to the counter and a man whose nametag featured only a random assortment of lines and was of an unfathomable background looked at him with a gaze of unrecognition. He spoke to Jake in a language he wasn’t familiar with, but the blur of constants and vowels sounded vaguely like “Hap flu?” Much of the man’s face was covered by a shock of black hair, or by a pair of giant coke-bottle glasses, and the rest was covered by acne, which also had acne on it.
“
Yeah, I’ll have a cheeseburger, plain, a side of fries and a vanilla milkshake.”
“
Hun fleaserber, fives anna kajilla fecksick, fillthir de handyjing hels?”
Jake blinked a minute, struggling to try and make sense of what the man had said back to him. (At least, Jake thought it was a man, but now that he thought about it, he couldn’t exactly be sure.) Then Jake nodded in confirmation. “Uh, yeah.”
“
Sezdrendyfir.”
Jake blinked again for a long moment and fished out a ten-dollar bill. Surely that would be enough to pay whatever bizarre figure it was this man (at least he
thought
it was a man) was asking for. The creature lifted the ten-dollar bill up and glanced at it in the light. He put it down on the counter and ran a marker across the top of it, then handed it back to Jake, shaking his head. Jake peered back curiously, examined his ten as he tried to figure out what the marker had done (nothing, as far as he could tell) then pocketed the ten and pulled a twenty out of his wallet.
“
Try this one,” Jake told him, holding the bill out to the maybe-a-man-but-still-not-sure.
The thing held the bill up to the light, peered at it for a long moment, then set it down on the counter and ran the marker over it again. He (at least Jake thought it was more
likely
to be a he) scrutinized the bill as if it might bite. Then, after a good two minutes or so of inspecting every corner of the scrap of paper, the employee (Jake had decided to think of it as an it – much safer that way) pushed a button and the tray opened. It shoved the bill into the tray and then picked up a roll of quarters, rapping the roll against the edge of the counter. It poured the roll into the black plastic tray and then began counting out quarters. It was, it seemed, out of ones. And fives. And tens. Fourteen dollars or so of quarters later, the being of indiscriminate gender handed Jake a scrap of paper with a number on it. (Or perhaps it was a hieroglyphic. The ink had smudged and made a mostly unrecognizable blob that Jake thought
might have been 14. Or an owl. Perhaps both.) Jake
pondered the paper as he moved over to the side and proceeded to wait.
A few minutes later, Jake saw his food get put up on the metal ledge behind the counter. Just a few sparse feet away waited his meal. And there it waited. And waited. And waited. Fifteen minutes or so later, an employee came out of the back and picked up Jake’s tray. He carted it over to the counter, and yelled out the wrong number. (Or at least Jake assumed it was the wrong number. They had yelled out 73, which it seemed unlikely matched the thing on his piece of paper.)
“
I think that’s me,” Jake said quietly. “You might just have your number wrong.”
The new employee, just as inscrutable as the last, picked up Jake’s piece of paper, and compared it to the one in his other hand. His eyes (Jake was sure this one was a he, although his age looked like it might have been as low as twelve, around the same as the man’s likely IQ) moved back and forth between the two several times before he shrugged and handed Jake the tray.
Jake took the tray over and began walking through the rows of booths. Each and every one of them was dirty beyond use. Some of them had mustard and ketchup all over them. Another was covered almost entirely in napkins. Yet another still was draped in the wreckage of the Great Plastic Spoon/Fork War of The Reasonably Recent Past, and no one had cleaned any of them. He kept walking away from the counter and finally reached a small two-seater table that looked serviceable, although one of the seats was missing a back. He put his tray down atop of the table and moved to sit in one of the seats, the one with a back, which promptly bent and dropped him to the floor.
Inhaling a long breath, Jake stood back up, dusted himself off and moved over to the other chair, the one without the back, testing it before he sat down in it, this time without collapse. He opened the Styrofoam containers to find that his order was incorrect on every level. Instead of a plain hamburger, he had a chicken sandwich with everything on it, including extra jalapeños. Instead of fries, he had onion rings. Instead of a vanilla shake, he had club soda. But Jake was too tired to go argue with the androgynous clerk who spoke only ancient Babylonian with a lisp and a stutter, so he simply ate his completely incorrect order in sadness.
His cell phone rang part way through his meal, and he knew that ringtone, that pop song that he’d only tolerated because it was what his fiancée had wanted him to hear when she called. Well, now it was his ex-fiancée’s he figured, and he didn’t feel like taking her call. She had found her key, he supposed. He pushed the button on the side of his phone to silence it and a minute or two later, the voicemail sound went off, but he simply pushed the button to ignore that too. It was entirely possible that she had a valid reason for getting balled by his best friend (okay, ex-best friend) but he somehow doubted it. He was pretty sure he knew how the message would play out. She’d say it was just a one-time thing. She’d say she was weak. She’d say that she never meant to hurt him. She’d say to blame her and not his best friend. She’d say she wanted to work it out. She’d say that she could change. She’s say anything she could to convince him that she wasn’t a traitorous whore who’d been getting her brains screwed out by his best friend whenever they had a spare moment.
When Jake thought about it, he realized she’d probably been lying to him on every level for a while, and that her message would likely go on for a rather long time, and his voicemail had never been able to handle deleting a message unlistened to. And he didn’t want the hassle of listening to and deleting the message right now. They were done, that was all there was to it, and he was afraid if he listened to the message, he might just give her a chance, and god only knows why. Because it was easier than arguing with her, possibly.
About halfway through the meal he hadn’t ordered, Jake just didn’t feel like eating anymore, so he got up and walked out, not bothering to bus his tray. After all the things they had screwed up, he didn’t mind letting them clean up his mess. Let them suffer his one minor act of rebellion. He pushed open the door and made his way to his car, climbing back in and forcing the engine back to life. He scowled a little bit as he started backing out into the parking lot.
His cell phone rang again, a different tone this time, but he chose to ignore it as well. Judas Iscariot himself. Several minutes later, the voicemail again. Ignore. It would be a different voice on the voicemail, but the message would be the same. Didn’t mean it. One-time. She still loves you. Don’t take it out on her. All his fault. The same bullshit, just a different octave. His so-called best friend had a way of making anything sound like it was the only possible course events could have taken. Like there was never a choice when it came to anything. His ex did the same thing. Like destiny made all their decisions for them. No fault, no blame. They deserved each other anyway. And really, did they need to talk so damn long to his voicemail?
His Nova sputtered as it wove through traffic, threatening to die at any moment, which made Jake smack the dashboard from time to time. It was, perhaps, the angriest he’d been all day. He could get past his company throwing away all of their hard work to pinch a few pennies. He could get past his fiancée and best friend having a fling that put porn flicks to shame. He could get past his car radio getting stuck on stupid love songs. He could even get past the guy (at least he thought it
might
have been a guy) screwing up his order at the fast food joint. But he would be
damned
if his Nova was going to die on him today. If it even started thinking about dying, he’d beat it to death, just to beat it to the punch.
The sound of honking behind him snapped his attention back to the road. The semi that was roaring up on the tail of his car took him by total surprise. If he’d been able to talk to the semi driver, he’d find that the man’s brakes had gone out and he was fighting to control to the lumbering vehicle. But Jake couldn’t talk to him because he was too busy screaming as the semi plowed into the back of his Nova, sending it flying across the road and into a telephone pole. That wood pillar crushed in a part of Jake’s hood and Jake leaned his head back, blinking, struggling to focus again.
He hurt like hell, his body felt like it’d been through a blender, but he was alive. He had to laugh, his head swimming and fuzzy, at the sheer absurdity of it. After all this, something had finally gone his way.
Then, from near the hood of his car, Jake heard a very big wooden crack, and his head turned, dazedly, just in time to see the telephone pole coming down on top of him. “Well, fu-“ Jake said just as the pole slammed into the roof of the car, the massive weight of it flattening the passenger’s compartment, crushing and killing Jake Altford nearly instantly.
And
that
was when Jake’s day
really
began to get bad.
*
*
*
*
*
“
O
h, get
up
,” a voice told him. “You’re only dead. It’s not like it’s the end of the world.” These words, although all words Jake had heard before individually, weren’t making any sense to him in that particular order.
“
Wait, what?” Jake’s eyes opened and he saw an older man, in his late fifties or early sixties Jake figured, looming over him, scowling down at him. “Who the hell are you? What just happened?”
“
You died, you moron,” the short man sighed in a rather annoyed tone. “What did you think was going to happen? A telephone pole flattened you like a buttermilk pancake.” Jake’s eyes combed over the man, considering him for a long moment. He was compact but round, with deep blue eyes the shade of the ocean at nightfall. He was balding on top but had a massive white beard, as if someone had tugged on a few chin hairs and yanked most of his hair from the top of his head down. There was still a scattered collection of black and white hair atop the man’s head that refused to give up the fight, however, and each strand seemed to be trying to guard a particular section of scalp. His eyebrows were massive and flared up like spikes, jutting at least half an inch upwards from his face. “Did you want to take a look at your body?”
“
Body?” Jake asked incredulously.
The portly man put his hands on his hips, shaking his head with another sigh. Jake noticed, for the first time, that the man was in a white toga of sorts, with white flipflops on his massive feet. “You know, kid, you’re not the only dead person I have to pick up today, so spare me the ‘oh-what-big-eyes-you-have-Grandmother’ routine, ‘cause I ain’t in the mood today. You died. You’re dead. Kaput. Expired. You’ve snuffed it. Whole nine yards. Tough break, but that’s death for you. Let’s go.”