Twenty-Five

Soul Gun

I woke up sometime later. The sun hadn't come up yet, but I could feel myself in bed. I had the blankets pulled up all the way over my head. I was freezing. Who cranked the air conditioning in this room? And the bed felt like a sheet of cold steel.

Which, of course, it was.

I was lying on a slab in the morgue.

All I had witnessed countless times in the past had, at last, come to pass for me: I was dead. And my discorporated soul was hanging around the flesh, as if it had nothing better to do. I tried calling out to Paul, but I heard no response. Was he in the Next Place already? I hoped so. Even cold-blooded killers needed a rest.

So. This was death. Visited many times, never wanted to live there. When I'd died the first time, and Robert had absorbed my soul, I had only been hanging around my body for an hour or so. My flesh was still relatively warm, and rigor mortis was a long ways down the road. Now, however, I could feel my physical body turn traitor. It longed to crawl in some cool earth and break down, chemically, into nutrients to feed future plant life. I wanted to carry on thinking and being and knowing and learning. We were at cross purposes. But I wasn't going to give up without a fight.

I just prayed I would still be able to do a resurrection.

Granted, I never tried it on myself. Performing one took a lot out of me when I was alive-God only knows what it would do now I was dead. Truly, completely, utterly dead, I mean.

Many souls have asked me what it's like to perform a resurrection. I don't know if they're curious about the process, or if they're trying to glom some information for their own purposes.

Nevertheless, my answer is always the same: I honestly don't know. Bringing a soul back from the dead is an art that was passed down to me from Robert, and I suppose he'd learned it from the man who'd done the same for him. Maybe it went back centuries-dare I say back to the time of Christ, when he worked his mojo on poor old Lazarus? Was someone around then to learn the trick? And were they able to describe it?

If pressed to explain it, I guess I would say it's like struggling to remember something. You don't quite know what you're doing when you're “racking your brain,” but clearly, some kind of mechanical process is in effect. Then, all of sudden, the memory pops back. Or, it doesn't.

That's the same deal with resurrection.

I laid there and tried to remember how to raise somebody-namely, myself-from the dead. I ran through every possible train of thought: My own death and rebirth; the first time I brought somebody else back, seeing Brad Larsen, dead in the muddy waters of Woody Creek…

And then, it worked. I immediately forgot exactly how it worked, but it did.

I started to come back to life.

After a while, I sat up, and the sheet dropped from my face. Boy, did I feel like a lump of shit. This was a hundred times worse than the worst hangover or flu I'd ever known, easy. My physical body was not happy with me one bit. My physical body wanted to check in at Hotel Deep Six as soon as possible.

I threw one leg over the table, then the other, then slid my ass off, landed on my feet, and managed to stay there for a second. Then my entire naked form collapsed and smacked into the cold tile floor. Fortunately, my body was too involved in its own internal suffering to acknowledge the blow.

Eventually, I got to my feet and surveyed my surroundings. Definitely a morgue. I needed to find the ME's office, and hope he kept a spare pair of pants around, or at the very least, hospital scrubs. Maybe they even had my own clothes around here somewhere, sealed up in a plastic baggie. I opened up a couple of drawers, but didn't find a thing. Just a lot of doctor toys-cotton balls, bottles of rubbing alcohol, tongue suppressors, scalpels.

The ME's office was down the hall. Predictably, the door was locked.

Across the room was a fire extinguisher and a fireman's axe, sealed in a box with a glass door. I thought about smashing it with my fist, but then I'd have yet another cut to heal, and I wasn't sure my newly-resurrection form could keep up with me. I grabbed a sheet from a nearby stiff, wrapped it around my elbow, then shattered the sucker with a quick jab. I took the axe back to the ME's office, and chopped at the handle.

“What the hell are you doing?"

I turned around. A young woman in blue scrubs was staring at me. I had to think fast. A reasonable explanation for a naked, supposedly dead man trying to break into an office? Yeah, sure. Then it came to me.

I lifted up the axe and started lurching toward her, zombie-style. "Braaaiins… I chanted. “I neeed… Braaaaaiiinssss… "

My gambit paid off. The woman, who surely must have seen George Romero's Night of the Living Dead at a drive-in at some point, took off screaming down the hall. It gave me enough to time to finish my work on the door handle and force my way in. Bingo. Found my bloodied suit wrapped up in plastic with DEL WINTER, 6/76-ah, my brilliant alias-written in marker on the front.

I got dressed, washed up as best I could, then set off to look for an elevator.

This was a nice hospital, which was a relief. I wasn't stuck in a city morgue-apparently, somebody had tried to fight to save my life. I felt a bit of gratitude. Had I the time, I would have hunted down that surgeon and bought him a drink to thank him for the effort. Maybe even to tell him, “Hey-it worked!"

Finally, I located a set of stairs, which led up a level to an elevator. I was apparently still a floor or two underground. I pressed the button with the up arrow and waited. After a few short moments, the doors opened. There were four other people in the elevator. I stepped into the car, and everyone collectively gasped and inched themselves backward. Of course they would-after all, I was a walking corpse in a bloody tuxedo, carrying an axe. I felt the need to explain things.

“Head wounds,” I said. “They bleed like anything. One tiny cut on the top of your head? Boom-all of a sudden, it starts gushing like the geyser at Yellowstone Park."

Nobody said a word. They stared at everything else in the car-the lit numbers, the walls, the reflective security mirror, the translucent buttons-everything but me.

“Nobody worry-I'm going to be fine,” I said. I put the axe down and rested it against the wall, a sign of good faith.

One woman broke the holding pattern. She stared at me, looking as if she was going to burst.

“What?” I asked her.

“But your head, sir… your head…"

“It looks bad, I know. But I'm fine, honest."

The woman swallowed. “Sir… your head is still bleeding."

Now that I looked at my own shadow on the elevator wall, I could see she was right. Tiny jets of liquid were still shooting out from the top of my head. Must be an aftershock of the resurrection, I thought. Or the simple fact that I was ambulatory again, moving limbs, breathing air, pumping blood once again.

I eyed the woman up and down, then reached out and ripped the woman's blue scarf right from around her neck. “Thanks,” I told her, wrapping it around my head.

Then I pushed the CLOSE DOOR button.

The woman fainted dead away. I felt bad about that.

I left the hospital and got my bearings. The sign out front read JEFFERSON UNIVERSITY HOSPITAL, and the sign plate on the corner of a nearby building read Chestnut Street. Thankfully, I knew where I was. I'd passed here a couple of days ago-rather, Paul had passed here a couple of day ago, with Susannah, on a shopping excursion.