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Life after Life

By Amanda Flieder

www.amandaflieder.ca

Copyright © 2018 Amanda Flieder

Cover Art: Tiger image by Jessica Weiller, Lake image by Gabriel Santiago

www.unsplash.com

All rights reserved.

No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means – electronic, mechanical, photocopying, and recording or otherwise – without the prior written permission of the author, except for brief passages quoted by a reviewer in a newspaper or magazine. To perform any of the above is an infringement of copyright law.

1

Liam laid at the edge of the curb and – of course – noted the irony.

Today had been beautiful weather and walking to the fair had seemed like a perfectly good reason to not bother with classes. The world wouldn’t end if he skipped one Wednesday on account of ice cream and a walk across the park and maybe splurge and pay for tickets to go on a couple of the carnival rides. Apparently the universe had a sense of humor, because it was not the world that was ending. Liam’s part in the world, however, most definitely was. That he wasn’t going to finish tonight, and hand it in a couple days early tomorrow, that essay which he’d actually enjoyed researching and writing over the past three weeks was a bit of a piss-off. As for his classes, the logic behind skipping them today was that he was already passing, so why pretend he was keen on winning awards? He had been in the running for a few of the fancier honors that came with fat cheques before the nice weather had signaled that summer had arrived… that had also been before Nish had decided to walk out on the apartment they’d been splitting rent on and proved she’d been honest when stating she’d assumed he only viewed their arrangement as just friends with benefits.

Everyone said that your life flashes before your eyes when you died. The high and low points and a bunch of stuff you never really noticed or thought about, and then some other fancy bru-ha-ha about lifting out of your body and looking around that eventually culminated in a white light and whatever came after.

For him, it was more pain than he ever thought possible culminating in a scream that he noted had a terrible effect on the onlookers because they’d all gone worse shades of ill than they were wearing already. Then he’d choked on some part of his insides that had been squishy before meeting the jacked-up pickup truck but were now liquefied after being introduced, burbled what should’ve been another scream, and just woken up here in the dark.

At least the pain had stopped.

Liam sat up and clutched at his chest for a moment and, although it wasn’t rising and falling, it wasn’t collapsed anymore. He couldn’t see his hand in front of his face, but wiggling his fingers with it held up close assured him his eyes were open. And that he could still feel pain. He scrubbed a fist into the eye he’d stabbed with a fingertip and felt around where he was sitting. His butt and legs told him he was resting on something as solid and cool as smooth concrete, but his hand found zero resistance around and under him. He was sitting on something hard, but could grab his own ass; that was new.

There was a loud shunk sound of warehouse lights being turned on and then searing white replaced the perfect black. Even covering both his eyes with his hands barely made a dint in the brightness burning the back of his skull like a police flashlight penetrating a hangover. He briefly considered all the common theories about near-death experiences and discounted each one just as fast as he thought of them. Whatever this was, it apparently wasn’t common enough for near-death survivors to have talked about. Or this was an experience that people didn’t come back from to provide a description.

He opened his mouth to yell for the lights to be turned back off because not seeing from too much dark was better than not seeing from too much light and nothing came out. He thought for a second, remembered he wasn’t breathing so had no exhalation to vibrate his larynx, then inhaled and tried again.

“That’s a bit bright!” he yelled, with the expectation that something would happen. It was beyond a let-down when nothing occurred. Some instinctive part of his mind – likely the same part that had released the primal scream when he’d been dying – whispered that he was dead and alone.

He used the last of his inhalation to scoff. Everyone died alone. There had been a shunk sound, though, before the bright (it wasn’t like he could call this wattage simply ‘light’) had turned on. He could feel his clothes so he wasn’t naked, and in spite of not finding anything with his hand, the nothing under his butt and legs was firm. He shifted around and hid his eyes in the crook of his elbow, which actually did block some of the bright, and stomped his feet a couple times. The soles of his shoes thumped dully and jarred at an elevation equal to what he was sitting on. He could reach under both feet to grab the bottoms of each shoe, but when he stood up he was standing on something solid.

That little voice of instinct attempted to cut into his thoughts with a question about just how far down things went below the nothing that he was standing on, so he slapped the pocket he kept some change in for the coffee machine and heard the usual jingle of a few coins. He took one out and dropped it. In the right amount of time for him to be standing on a floor, there was the sound of the coin hitting, bouncing, and rolling a bit before it bumped into the side of his foot and he heard it fall over and rattle as it came to a stop. He could pick it up as if it was sitting on the surface of water. That was pretty cool. He dropped it from just a few inches so he didn’t have to feel around for it and then scooped it up from underneath.

He dropped the coin back in his pocket and decided to test another theory that popped into his head. Everything was still a glare of bright when he dropped the arm covering his eyes, but only for the few seconds he needed to get the zipper on his jacket open. He snugged his elbow back up to protect his vision and stuffed the other hand into his jacket pocket. The ground was exactly where he expected it to be when he knelt down, and his fist thumped against the same flat solidness as his knee was resting on. He took his hand out of his pocket and could grab the underside of the knee he was kneeling on. The sleeve of his jacket shoved up his arm as if he was in the loo and about to wash his hands. He put his free hand back in his pocket and the solid ground was right there for him to find.

2

The instinctive voice tried to panic, but Liam was having fun teasing himself by taking his hand in and out of his pocket and playing with the ground that wasn’t actually there. He seemed to still have everything he’d been wearing before McTrucky de Grill had sped through a red light and reduced his torso to a sack of mulch, so Liam counted himself lucky in this current situation that he hadn’t died naked and decided to start walking. That decision ended after less than a minute when the smooth whatever-it-was he was in curved up to a slope that overcame the friction of his shoes and he slid back down. He turned around and went the other way. In double the first amount of time the same thing happened. He tried a bit of a smartass gamble and stayed up right at the cusp of where he was sliding and walked along it, but that didn’t seem to have an end so he made the assumption he was going around in circles like a goldfish.

He did a couple running jumps, but everything felt off balance and weird because he had to keep his elbow over his eyes to stop the bright from piercing through to the back of his skull. Maybe he was being judged? Some religions had a thing after you died that you got judged. (Maybe it was most religions? Liam hadn’t really paid attention.) If so, the trial was taking a while longer than he would’ve expected. He was somewhat miraculous in that he wasn’t a by-product of his terrible childhood, but his personality hadn’t lent itself to making a lot of near and dear friends so maybe he was a by-product in all the diagnosis terminology that usually got thrown at him whenever he’d been put in counseling, so maybe there was something there that needed a while to judge. Mostly he kept to himself, understood that being educated was his only way out of his crappy childhood, and didn’t really care too much about a lot. Or anything, if he was honest. There really shouldn’t be that much to judge.

Nish had said he was a cold fish, but that was a confusing description because she’d always crawled into bed with him when she wanted to warm up. He didn’t recall anything that he’d done which was immoral or illegal so far as society went – being a kid had let him know what that crap led to – and he’d never followed a religion. He’d helped out a couple people when he could, handing off a spare coat to that homeless guy and beating up some dick who tried to rape that drunk girl at a party the one time. The guy he gave a coat to had sincerely thanked him. The dick had pressed assault charges. Liam had been sentenced to a fine and some community service, but the girl had given him a hug and some cupcakes because she’d been recording herself on her phone when she’d passed out and gotten a video of the whole thing. The judge had figured it was excessive for Liam to have put the guy in the hospital, but the cops in the courtroom that day had mostly laughed when Liam replied he preferred putting the dick in the hospital than know that’s where the drunk girl had ended up.

And if this was some kind of judgement thing, wouldn’t there have been some kind of representation or booming voice full of wisdom? Even idiots got assigned a court lawyer that was obliged to meet with them once or twice. Unless the real god or gods didn’t buy into the modern notions of religions and all that theology was – as he’d mostly found he believed anyway – completely bunk. Wouldn’t that be the absolute cosmic joke on the human race? Ha-ha and hee-hee on everyone who keeps killing themselves and neighbours over their interpretation of spiritual supremacy: the higher powers all believe in something else and people are bumbling along on paths they made up on their own.

There was another loud shunk sound and Liam slowly pried his elbow away from his eyes. No searing brightness stabbed through his eyelids, but the total blackness hadn’t returned. He carefully opened one eye and was confronted with an endless, perfect, grey. He blinked both eyes open and looked around. There was nothing. Well, not quite because there was him standing there in the same clothes he’d dressed in this morning, but otherwise there wasn’t anything around him. He didn’t even have a shadow, a theory that he tested by jumping a couple of times and lifting his knees high enough to see under his feet.

He smiled at being able to do that, jump high and look around. He’d started as a kid doing what he’d learned years later was called ‘parkour’, only he’d been doing it whenever he wasn’t in foster care to get away from whatever asshole his mom was having sex with for whatever food, clothes, lodging, alcohol or drugs she was trading for at the time. Once he found out what parkour was, and that it was a sport he was legitimately good at it, he’d gotten further into the sport and further away from his upbringing until he was six foster homes separated from his mom and old enough to rent his own place. The two cops who’d gotten him into the last foster house and been references for him on his first apartment even came out to his tournaments and cheered for him as if he had parents. That was pretty nice. They were probably going to be upset that he was paste beside the sidewalk. That sucked.

Now that he really thought about it, being dead wasn’t so great. Just grey and boring. Unless he could figure out some way of making it not boring…? After all, he didn’t have to keep his eyes covered anymore.

He found a curve and did some running jumps with his sleeves held tight over his fists to see if he could find a top to whatever he was at the bottom of. No luck on a top, but he did find a ledge. It was a high ledge, but if he could get his hands to it than it was only a matter of physics to get the rest of him up there. Figuring out the correct jump to consistently reach the ledge was easy, figuring out the twist and pull to get on it was harder due to not being able to use his fingers; the ledge was made of the same smooth can’t-touch-this as the rest of the bowl.

Once on it, Liam found it was more of a catwalk than an actual ledge. If he lay flat on his stomach and reached as far as his jacket sleeves allowed, then he could hook his fingers around each side of it. He made the instinct part of his mind freak out a bit when he smirked and dropped his head forward, his shirt collar pushing on his throat, then figured he should attempt to see where this weird catwalk went and stood up. He was about to take the first step when he realized that would be a really dumb idea. He crouched down to the most uncomfortable position for walking imaginable so that his left hand ran along the edge and his right hand pressed against the grey nothing in front of him.

3

Careful to never step past where his right hand was dragging, he started on his awkward way. His brain told him he’d passed the edge of the bowl after enough time passed going in a straight line. The first corner was a pointy-edged thing that left him feeling glad he wasn’t a doofus who didn’t know to have a leading hand. The fifth corner was when his back started to ache from staying hunched over. The path was as absently random as ever, but it was continuous in a general direction away from where he’d started with the rights and lefts coming in pairs that made up a blocky sine wave pattern.

A spec against the grey appeared around the same time he’d decided to stop and take a stretching break. The spec wasn’t moving so it didn’t make much sense to try and hurry when his plodding efforts were taking him (eventually) toward it. Once he got moving again, the spec grew to become something made up of color that looked as out of place against the constant grey as Liam did… and it was person-shaped. As he didn’t know what, or if, anything was below him, he frustratingly kept to the same slow steps that had gotten him this far.

The person shape was a girl. He would’ve thought she was sleeping if her eyes had been closed. She was only wearing a tee-shirt, cut-off shorts, and tennis shoes. The elastic holding her pony tail seemed to be stopping her head from dropping down, but her hair hung below her like the loose end of a rope. He could see a few bruises on her biceps and around the tops of her feet, the fresh purple fighting to show through the dark tan. If she was even twelve yet, he’d have been surprised. She started crying the moment she saw him, her eyes begging for help and her mouth moving without any sound coming out. The catwalk ran right over top of where she was laying.

Liam inhaled so that he could talk. “You have to breathe in so that you have air to rattle your vocal cords,” he told her. Her eyes bugged out and she gasped in a breath.

“Am I dead?” she yelled, the sound surprising her enough that she jarred and lost the balance she’d been keeping on her hair elastic. Her head fell to the side and her bare arms flailed at nothing, her pony tail sliding looser until she froze and pulled herself back into balance. He was suddenly very glad to have made his usual choice of jacket, shirt and pants when he’d gotten up this morning.

“I know I’m dead, so it’s not looking good for you being as we’re here in the same place,” he answered. She cried harder for a moment.

“Is this Hell?” she whimpered.

“Beats me,” he shrugged. “You’ve been here a while, then?”

She only nodded slightly, not wanting to move very much in case she lost her balance again.

“Is it always grey?” he asked, looking around.

“No,” she crossed her arms over her chest and hugged tight. “It was black when I got here. Then it all got so bright I couldn’t see. Then it gets grey for a while before the black and bright repeat,” she replied in short sentences, inhaling breaths between each one.

“How many times has it repeated?”

“Twice,” she looked around, only her eyes moving. That meant there was at least one more person here, and Liam was the third that she knew of.

“What’s your name?” he asked.

“Kay–” she stopped herself and looked at him nervously. “I’m not supposed to talk to strangers,” she stated, suddenly worried.

“That’s only good advice if you know there are people you know around,” he told her, point blank. “My name’s Liam,” he added. “I died maybe a couple hours ago, but it’s hard to tell because nothing changes here.”

“I’m Kaylynd,” she blurted. “Please help me,” she pleaded, starting to cry again.

“You need to stand up,” he instructed. She shook her head within the confined range of motion of her ponytail.

“I can’t,” she reached out carefully and tried to brace with one hand like someone normally would to get off their back, but her arm just waved down until her shirt-sleeve stopped the motion.

“Can you do a sit-up?” he asked, and her only reply was more tears leaking out of the corners of her eyes. “Just plant your feet flat with your knees bent up so the bottoms of your shoes are solid,” he instructed. She did as told, her eyes going wide with surprise when it worked and she could thump her feet against the solid nothing. “That’s good, Kaylynd. Now you just have to curl up so that you’re sitting on your butt. You can hook your hands onto the back of your thighs if you need the help to pull yourself up.”

She struggled through the motion, but kicking her legs a bit got the momentum going and soon she was sitting up. She curled around her knees and just rested her neck and shoulders forward. The ache looked like it was gone as fast as it had disappeared for him when he’d stopped to stretch out from being crouched over. She looked up and smiled through another round of tears, her mouth moving and no sound coming out.

“You gotta breathe in first, remember?” he reminded her.

“I didn’t know I’d be able to sit,” she told him. “How do I stand up?”

The question was eager and she was looking around at all the grey around her as if there was some kind of answer there to see.

“Set your feet a little wider than your hips and shift your weight onto them, and then just stand up,” he instructed, squatting and straightening to demonstrate. She tipped forward up onto her feet and – holding her arms out like she was about to do a tight-rope routine – slowly pushed up so that she was standing. She tested shifting her weight from one foot to the other, grinning up at Liam that both feet held her weight.

4

He showed her how wide the catwalk was as he told her about his walk to get from where he’d woken up to where she was. Going over what he knew gave him enough time to figure out how to get her up there with him, which was just a matter of trusting his jacket to be sewn well enough to support her weight and getting his footing and balance right so that he didn’t have to use his hands for anything except pulling her up. The hug she grappled around his waist once they were on the same elevation was the most genuine affection he’d ever felt in a single gesture and, just like that, he hugged her back. He couldn’t remember ever in his life hugging someone and really meaning it in place of words. If he’d been breathing, the emotion would’ve sucked the air right out of him.

Suddenly falling into an unknown was terrifying because if he fell, this scared kid would be stuck up here on a catwalk that she couldn’t see. The way the two cops always came to his tournaments and cheered for him suddenly made sense, too. He’d thought they were being nice, or being paid, but they were being what he now needed to be: that adult who looks out for someone else’s kid.

Nish’s brain would’ve broke to know about this moment happening inside Liam’s head.

Liam gave Kaylynd the dos and don’ts of being up here, the safety briefing that every rookie got (or damn well should get, in Liam’s opinion) before running parkour on any course they weren’t familiar with. Her fingers locked around his belt at the back because he needed both hands to be able to follow the catwalk, and then they started slowly making their way in the direction of what he was considering forward.

Around the same amount of time passed between when he’d gotten out of his bowl and first seen Kaylynd when his brain started expecting to see another spec. The grey nothing continued indefinitely. They kept walking, stopping to stretch out sore muscles whenever they needed to, and still there was just the catwalk and more grey nothing. The not needing to breathe came with the added bonuses of not needing to eat, sleep, or use the bathroom, so they just kept going.

By the time he’d lost count of how many stops they’d made, he knew she was ten and a half, everything in her life that had occurred from birth to death (she’d drowned at a lake by her house when she was swimming with friends after school), and every moment of pre-teen drama that had happened during this school year for her. He was pretty sure she’d drowned because she was trying to talk to the fish about Macy, who she hated and was also who her teacher, Mr. Cameron, had made her sit beside in school because she and Macy had been friends last month except now they weren’t because they both liked Ricky and… Liam shook his head and felt a smile pull at the corner of his mouth. Kaylynd was a good kid, and he could tell she was going to be missed by a lot of people. Probably the cops who came to his tournaments would be the only ones who bothered to come to his funeral.

Kids like Kaylynd, though, they were a tragic loss. She had a kid brother and a baby sister that were good kids and whom she obviously adored (even though they were both so annoying), and parents who were good parents (even if her mom did still treat her like she was only nine instead of her actual, and much more mature, ten and a half). Kids like Kaylynd deserved a nice funeral and some kind of life after death that wasn’t being stuck in some monochrome eternity of nothing. She was supposed to have green fields and angels and pretty stuff like that.

The consistent babbling paused as he started getting ready to get moving again. When he glanced over his shoulder because she didn’t grab onto his belt by familiar habit like she had been doing, she was looking the other way and chewing on her fingernails. Instead of reaching for his belt, she reached out without looking and tucked her fingers into his hand.

“This is how much time passes before they turn off the grey,” she stated quietly around the fingernails she was chewing down to nubs, eyes wide and looking everywhere as she squeezed his hand tighter and shifted so she was tucked against his arm.

“How about we wait here until we know if it’s going to happen or not?” he asked. She shook her head, biting faster before noticing that the fingernail was down to bleeding and then cringing because her mom was going to be mad at her again for wrecking her hands.

“I heard growling the first time,” she whispered.

“Then we should get moving so we’re further away,” he said. She nodded, putting on a brave smile because she believed the confidence he was wearing, and when he turned back to grab onto the edge of the catwalk her fingers wrapped around his belt and held on tight. He’d been trying to not put a lot of thought into the other time she said the cycle had happened. He had enough monsters in his memories for his imagination to draw from, so learning that she’d heard growling worth being afraid of didn’t help with keeping the memories safely behind the bars of the coping strategies the counselors had given him.

The roar from a great distance away that ended their next break also didn’t help.

He started off faster this time. There was no way of knowing where they were going, but at least it was a direction away from whatever had growled when it got here and was now roaring. He felt his stomach drop when a new spec appeared in the distance, and then fear twisted his stomach into a cold knot that tightened right up into his throat as he realized what that spec in front of them was. Kaylynd’s grip cinching tighter on his belt at the next roar behind them – which wasn’t as distant as before – pushed him forward, shaking and sweating, toward the door that had started everything wrong with his childhood.

5

He put his hand on the doorknob and tried to fight off the memory. This was the door into the bathroom of his dad’s place. The knowledge burned into Liam’s skull was that the next turn of the catwalk followed the bathroom’s layout and he would be leading the way through where his dad had fallen in the tub and hit his head, around the corner into his parent’s bedroom where his mom was already high and having sex with her dealer because she couldn’t cope with having found the body so called for a hit before calling the cops. A neighbor had heard her initial screaming, though, and called the cops because of it. Liam had come home from school after his mom’s dealer showed up, and before the cops arrived, wondered about the weird voice in his parents’ bedroom, and escaped through the bathroom when the dealer tried to rape him too.

“Kaylynd, I need you to be really good for a minute, and it’s going to be really hard to do,” he warned her, his voice breaking. “Can you follow me with your eyes closed?”

“Not very well,” she admitted. Which was true, she’d tripped up on her own or his feet every time she tried. She must’ve been in a growth spurt. “I’m not very good at –”

Another roar, even closer, interrupted her and she pressed closer to Liam’s back. Just like parkour, Liam decided he was better off with choosing the path that he already knew over staying out here and waiting for whatever unknown path would be presented when whatever was roaring caught up.

“Okay. I need you to let go,” he heaved a sigh and tapped her wrists gently. She swallowed a whimper and was staring up at him with watery, green eyes when he straightened and turned around. She was a perfect snapshot of summer innocence. “You know how baby monkeys wrap their arms and legs around their mom and hold on so she can go flipping through the trees?” he asked. She nodded, pushing a brave look onto her face, and he leaned forward to hug her. She wrapped around his torso in a grip that would’ve made a momma monkey proud and he stood up easily. “Keep your eyes closed and your head down. Whatever you do, don’t look at anything on the other side of this door.”

She did as she was told, her arms and legs pulling tighter as he rested his hand on the door knob again.

“Are you scared?” her small whisper blew down his collar.

“More than I’ve ever been in my life,” he admitted. If his heart had still been beating, it would have been racing to the point of pain. He glanced back at another roar and saw a new spec behind them. It was hard to focus on because it was… moving. “Keep your eyes closed and your head down, Kaylynd.”

The bathroom was still small and – just like the image burned into his memory – only one of the two light bulbs was working. Although it looked smaller now that he was bigger, the smell was just what he remembered. Liam saw his six-year-old self, frozen in the moment of seeing his dad naked and dead with blood still oozing down the drain with the water. In that moment, his younger self had known beyond all and any doubts that he was absolutely and utterly alone. He was alone with the dealer who was about to gleefully laugh and throw his mom’s feeble attempt to be maternally defensive into a dresser, intent on coming after Liam, and yet somehow he’d known…

Time started as the laugh sounded from the bedroom, and the younger Liam looked up at… himself. Liam let go of Kaylynd with one hand and squeezed his own shoulder.

“Cops are on the porch. Run. Bounce off the walls so you don’t slow down and just run,” he told himself.

There was the crash from the bedroom and Liam watched his younger self rip open the door into the hallway and bolt out. He’d never told anyone about the feeling of a hand on his shoulder, or that he knew there were cops outside, but in that moment he’d gone from being alone to knowing somebody was looking out for him. ‘That somebody’ hadn’t come back despite running his heart right out of his chest keeping ahead of the creep who was only a step behind him the whole way through the house, and all the times after this moment a hand had never been on his shoulder again. At least now, on this side of the moment, he knew why.

Kaylynd moved in his arms and Liam pressed her head down into the corner of his neck and shoulder so that she couldn’t look around to see what was happening. This had been the start of what had messed him up for his whole life, and she didn’t need to go through it now. He followed the turning into the bedroom and the whole house evaporated into dust that faded into the same grey as before they’d gone in. He realized, once everything was gone, that that day had been the worst and most terrifying thing that had ever happened to him. He could now say honestly that that day was worse than dying in a gutter.

The roar was close enough to raise the hair on Liam’s neck and he spun in place to look back. The spec behind them was definitely moving, and it was definitely getting bigger.

“You did really good, Kaylynd,” he said, putting her down. “Let’s get moving a bit faster, yeah?”

She nodded hard and grabbed onto his belt after looking back at whatever was coming up behind them and paling at least two skin tones. They’d drifted more to the middle of the catwalk so it took a moment of searching to find the edge. Then they were off at something closer to a jog than the basic walking that they’d been doing so far.

The next door came up fast and Liam didn’t recognize it. Kaylynd’s fingers slipped out of his belt and the sound of her footfalls stopped. She wouldn’t come any closer to it than where she was frozen in place nearly ten feet away.

6

“What’s wrong?” he asked. She just shook her head to the negative and backed up two steps. He opened his arms and leaned forward a bit in invitation. “How about like a monkey?” he asked, trying not to notice that whatever was following them was taking on a decidedly feline way of moving that made him feel like the proverbial mouse in a maze.

Kaylynd stared at him hard, and then whatever weight she was measuring him against dropped and she launched forward to slam into his waiting arms. This door was just at the beginning of a straight length of catwalk, so at least he knew there weren’t going to be any invisible corners to navigate like when going through the bathroom from his childhood. This was also a car door, and it creaked as he opened it.

“Hurry, baby! Get in, get in!”

The panic was impossible to ignore and Liam dove through into the back seat of some old beater on the side of a street that fronted a bunch of tightly packed row houses. A smaller version of Kaylynd struggled ahead of her mom to get into the front passenger seat, her mom pushing from behind while carrying some shopping bags. Something slammed into the car and then the door slammed and Kaylynd’s mom turned to fight whatever had caught up with them. The older version of Kaylynd was crying just as hard as the toddler as her mom ducked and weaved like a pro just outside the passenger window. The guy attacking them had some kind of pipe or cane and Kaylynd’s mom wrestled it away from him and smoked him upside the head with it hard enough to sprawl the guy out on the sidewalk. Her mom did this awesome seventies movie hood slide and dropped into the driver’s seat, leaving the bags of clothes and a few toys spilled out on the sidewalk.

“It’s okay now, baby,” she murmured as she slammed the driver’s door, although to Liam it sounded like she was saying it more to comfort herself than to comfort her daughter. The beater’s engine stammered to life as the guy outside sat up and little Kaylynd screamed, her small face pressed to the glass to keep a watch on their attacker. Her mom slammed the car into gear, revved the engine, and squealed the tires as the beater lurched away from the curb into a chorus of honking cars protesting the sudden merge.

The engine knocked to a stop two blocks away – the turns following the path of the catwalk – and Kaylynd’s mom snarled and slammed her hands into the steering wheel. Liam followed her, carrying her daughter the same way she was carrying the younger version, as she shoved out of the car and started running down the street. A car screeched to a halt as she ran into an intersection, the grill protector of the police cruiser less than an inch from her shins. Kaylynd’s mom stared in shock, unable to process the occurrence quickly and the cop driving already scoffing and getting ready to yell at her to move. Liam was on the passenger side, and the officer sitting there was looking down at something else inside the car, not seeing the woman yet. Liam reached through the open window and flicked the passenger cop in the side of the face.

“Help her!” he ordered. The officer looked up, startled, and saw what her partner had missed. She punched a button on the dash to turn on the flashing red and blue lights and un-clicked her seat belt in one smooth motion.

“Are you all right?” she asked, voice full of concerned authority, as she swung open the passenger door and stepped out. Kaylynd’s mom dissolved into tears.

“Help!” she whispered, hugging Kaylynd tightly, her voice choked off and nearly useless. Someone yelling profanity interrupted the next question from the cop and both officers looked over to see the guy who’d attacked Kaylynd’s mom coming up fast, blind in his rage except for the woman he was targeting. Kaylynd’s mom kissed her daughter, then ripped her away and threw her at the woman cop who was half a car length away, turning to confront the guy – Kaylynd’s dad – while Kaylynd was still mid-flight.

The cop who’d been driving had reflexes that cats would be proud of and was out of the cruiser as fast as the woman cop caught Kayland and dropped her in it. Kaylynd’s dad registered the new threat too late and was knocked on his ass and pinned there by the cop who’d been driving. Kaylynd’s mom staggered back onto the hood of the cruiser, holding onto the grill protector for balance, as she was saved by a chance encounter that just as easily could’ve killed her if the cop hadn’t braked in time.

Liam ducked into the back seat to sit beside little Kaylynd. The bigger Kaylynd in his arms reached over with one hand and brushed the hair off the forehead of her terrified younger self as the door slammed shut and the second cop raced to the front of the cruiser to back up her partner.

“We’re going to be okay,” Kayland assured her younger self. “That’s Officer Lisa who caught us, and her brother is our new daddy now, and he’s so much better. We even get a brother and a sister and you’re going to be so happy real soon I promise.”

The back seat of this car evaporated, taking little Kaylynd with it, but instead of going back to grey everything solidified into a different car. The door was hanging open out onto a sunny street. The park that Liam had been going to was just ahead, and a crowd was gathered around… him. The ambulance was here, and the attendants were working madly to find signs of life on the crumpled corpse in front of them.

Kaylynd’s hands tucked around his belt as he stepped out of the car and reached down, finding the edge of the catwalk in the middle of the solid street. The path forward was directly toward himself. The little voice of instinct that he often taunted knew that if he touched himself, that was it; he could go back. Back to the street, back to the pain, and then to the hospital and through rehab and then probably back to school. He could live again. Whatever time had passed here, in whatever this place was, had only been a couple of minutes in reality.

But if he left, Kayland would be here by herself. Just a kid, a good kid, being hunted by whatever was catching up to them.

He followed the edge of the catwalk, her fingers holding hard to his belt, every step a work of labor as he got closer to himself because each step increased the pull to the body he’d lived in for his whole life. He did want to go back, he really did. Being dead at twenty-four wasn’t what he wanted. But Kaylynd was only ten and a half and the grey was a scary place.

7

He fought the gravity that made each movement nearly impossible, crawling on all fours to get over himself. Kaylynd tripped on one of his legs and the paramedic setting up the stretcher noticed the movement and thought it was spontaneous. The pair redoubled their efforts, and each step that Liam took away from the scene was easier than the one before. Another car with an open door beckoned straight ahead, on the path of the catwalk, and Liam crawled inside. The interior of it changed part way through and the closed door in front of him evaporated to reveal a door hanging open. They climbed out into a perfect summer day.

“I’m a doctor! Can I help?” the man yelled, leaving his car running as he slid down the steep edge right beside the road to the knot of kids that had just dragged Kaylynd out of the lake and toward the nearest trail up to the road.

“She’s not breathing!” one of the kids cried out as she looked up at the approaching doctor.

“Dad, help!” one of the boys with Kaylynd’s arm over his shoulders yelled.

The doctor swore and sprinted the few steps across the gravel beach toward the kids, yelling orders to lay Kaylynd down and asking how long since she’d stopped breathing. Somewhere in the confusion, he was able to get answers and get to her and get working to get her breathing. Kayland let go of Liam’s belt so she could stand beside him and watch the scene that was unfolding below. Liam knelt to feel the slope the doctor had slid down and his sleeve encountered the same smooth edge as the dish he’d been in when he’d first arrived in the grey.

“You’d better hurry,” Liam told her. “Wait too long and you risk brain damage.”

“What about you?” she asked, tucking her hand into his and looking up. He smiled at her.

“I’ll be good,” he assured her. She smiled her brave face, then her eyes watered up and she gripped around his waist in a hug that he felt all the way up to the top of his heart before she let go and spun away.

Her feet slid as she scooted down to the gravel beach. She stopped for a moment and waved back up at where Liam was still standing. He returned the wave and was rewarded with a huge smile, and then she turned, crouched down, and touched her fingers to her own ankles. This time the scene evaporated, she went with it. Liam closed his eyes and held tight to the fading sound of coughing and vomiting that started the instant Kaylynd went back.

The growling was closer than expected when the grey settled into silence. The catlike motion of what had been stalking them was now easy to attribute to the creature because proximity provided a clear view of the black stripes caging the orange fur. Something in the tone of the growl wasn’t right though and, as Liam watched the distant tiger, he saw it ducking and cringing from its own worst day. The big cat was terrified as it slunk and clung to the edges of the catwalk.

When Liam turned back to face what he considered forward, there was a jeep parked across a straight run at what he figured would be a few turnings away. All the doors were hanging open. He’d never seen a vehicle with a snorkel except in jungle movies, so he assumed this was for the tiger. That was good. It meant if he got to the other side of the jeep, the tiger should just stay in its own life because (Liam figured) animals preferred to stay alive.

Liam found the edge of the catwalk and hurried forward, smiling that the memory of Kaylynd’s grip on his belt had been replaced with the view of her brightest smile. He was doing some seriously comic book level hero stuff right now.

The jeep was idling, keys in the ignition, and all four doors opened wide. The radio started when he slid into the passenger seat and played in some other language for some song that didn’t make much sense because the rhythm of the lyrics didn’t seem to match the beat the way he understood popular music should be. When he looked up, heavy jungle had replaced the grey on all sides. Liam climbed over the manual gear shift and into the driver’s seat, letting the yelling he could hear be his guide once he climbed out and had feet on solid nothing again (the edge of the catwalk was, of course, leading him straight to the scene of the yelling).

A heavy caliber gunshot boomed. The leaves and branches directly behind his spine rustled and a few fell to the ground. A little moment of panic where his instincts told him he’d been shot almost made him run, but then he remembered he was already dead… after looking down to check his chest was still intact. The next corner swung left and broke out into a clearing that had been made only because it was packed flat by the amount of tromping on the low vegetation. In the middle of the flattened area was what was left of the tiger that was fighting its worst day back in the grey.

Liam stayed crouched low as the games officers and poacher finished their short shootout with one more shot, this time from a small caliber pistol. Kudos to the lady in uniform for just firing one shot into the poacher’s leg and then running over and smacking him in the head with the butt of her pistol while he was still screaming in shock. The rest of the game officers tied up the poacher and stripped all his gear and weapons before attempting to deal with the bleeding as the lady started going through his truck and pulling out whatever trophies he had with him. The growing pile of animal bits, collected from a lot of different animals, was enough to make Liam sick to his stomach.

The dead tiger was missing only one paw and had a long gash between its ribs and hips. One of the game officers was obviously swearing as he checked over the big cat, even opening its mouth, his shoulders hunching up in honest grieving over the waste of a beautiful animal as he set determinedly to try and resuscitate the tiger because all the needed bits for living were – if the man’s actions could be believed – still there. Liam couldn’t understand anything the officers were saying, but when each of the other officers paused, one by one, in whatever routine they had in order to pay silent respects over the warm body and offer help to the veterinarian, Liam empathized with them completely. He dropped his head and closed his eyes, mourning in his own way, until he felt the tickle on the back of his neck of thick whiskers and in-drawn breath. He froze in place. The same part of his mind that had noted the irony in his world ending by taking a day off school now ever so helpfully noted that he’d forgotten to pay attention to the tiger behind him because he was absorbed in the final moments of the one in front. Liam turned slowly and with an awareness all the way to his core that perhaps screaming in pain and oozing bodily fluids in the road really was a better place than right here and right now.

8

The tiger was watching the scene over Liam’s shoulder, barely even bothering to glance at the man crouching just ahead of him. When the big cat did lock eyes with Liam, there was so much more than just an animal looking out from the golden orbs. There were scars all over his body, and a limp when he stepped forward to sit down beside Liam with a grunt that turned into a sigh. He was an old cat, and tired. Reliving his worst day had exhausted him, but he hadn’t known any other way of life than to just keep fighting through so that’s what he’d done. His eyes, now that he could see himself dying, were just… sad.

Liam tentatively reached out and rested a careful hand on the tiger’s wide head, stroking and rubbing softly in a tender caress. The cat hooked a heavy front paw over the offered arm and turned his head into the contact, opening his mouth to pass his teeth harmlessly over Liam’s fingers. Liam smiled at the antics of the tiger lying down and rolling to his side so that he could hook both paws over Liam’s arm like an overgrown house cat. Liam sat down to play a little easier.

“You look like you could use a rest,” Liam told him when the big cat yawned.

As if on cue, the tiger rolled back to his belly and wiggled forward enough to shove the front of one shoulder against Liam’s hip. The big cat wrapped his front legs around Liam and then rested his head on Liam’s lap. When the cat blinked up at him with a question filling his eyes, Liam dropped an arm across the cat’s neck. After a moment, he bent his arm so that he could gently rub his fingers between the tiger’s ears without removing the half-hug.

“Not this time, friend,” Liam told him. “I think you’ve done enough by yourself that this one time you don’t have to be alone.”

The tiger breathed on purpose, his throat rattling heavy and deep in a purr. They sat like that for a while, watching the super-human efforts of the vet together, and then the golden eyes slid closed and the purring slowly rattled to a stop. The weight in Liam’s lap faded away with the rest of the scene, leaving sparkles rippling and twinkling over the grey like starlight on water, until he was just sitting there alone amid the dullness with a gap the size of a tiger’s head between his arm and his legs.

Liam dropped his hand into his lap and just sat there in the middle of the nothing. He hadn’t expected the tiger to just lie down. He’d actually expected to be ripped apart and his bits that weren’t eaten to be flung out into the nothing he was now here alone in. He thought about Kaylynd and how genuine she could be, and then about the sad and tired tiger. He thought about Nish and wondered if anyone would tell her he was dead, or if she’d just find out from the school newspaper. He wondered if his obituary would even be worth a mention in the school newspaper because even after nearly six years attending there he didn’t actually have friends.

What he did have right now were a lot of emotions which – with a moment to acknowledge them – were actually really heavy and burbling up from really deep. It was like the flood gates opened for everything he’d been put through years of counseling to train him how to deal with – and during each session he’d wondered why – but now all of it was really real and hitting him at once in a way that nothing had ever gotten through to him before. If he’d been breathing, he would’ve been having a really hard time doing so. His palms were sweating and he couldn’t stop his legs from fidgeting. One part of his brain wanted to analyze, compartmentalize, and assign all the tidy terminology that his counselors had given him over the years. Instead he took a page out of Kaylynd’s book, crumpled in on himself, and cried so hard he thought he might throw up.

It might’ve been minutes or it might’ve been years – time was different here – when the crying finally stopped overriding everything else. When he’d been a teenager and had full meltdowns, typically he would just fall asleep after and feel sick for a couple of days and then he’d start to feel better. Right now, here in the grey, he didn’t feel tired. It was like he’d completely skipped over feeling crappy (or maybe had gotten it all out) and was already into the feeling better part. He still felt raw and shaky and if Kaylynd was here he’d definitely want to get one of those genuine hugs from her, but for the moment it was enough to just sit up and remember some of the good times. Slowly all that counseling worked its way into his thought process and he assigned the terminology his analytical grey matter needed: breakthrough. He felt better now – lighter – because he’d had a breakthrough.

He spent another lifetime (or maybe a couple minutes) sorting out the events since he’d died, and came up with a general theory that this was some kind of limbo state and he’d probably be stuck here until he really, actually died. Until then he could be some kind of Davy Jones or Charon, making sure anyone else that ended up here with him was transported appropriately. He could be that someone to help them get through their worst days, if they wanted. That was pretty cool.

He’d kept getting accused of being ‘disassociated’ in his sessions, and everyone kept wanting him to engage more and maybe try for an emotional contact with anything. His counselor last year had given him a plant, but Nish had overwatered it and killed it. Thinking about the advice now was a bit of a laugh; he couldn’t get much more engaged than by actively chauffeuring the mostly dead through whatever they needed, and this new level of relationship was a lot more engaging than the insincere interactions during childhood and at university. Straight up, he’d just saved a little girl from drowning and then comforted a wild tiger in death. There wasn’t anything from his life before dying that even came close to being that beautiful or intensely good.

Liam looked around at the grey and felt more comfortable in his skin than he ever had before. Inside his chest was calmer without a pulse driving him around and the constant demand of needing respiration, and his heart seemed to have more ability for feelings without having to dwell on circulation. His head felt calmer now, too, without having to worry about what was coming in regards to where to live and how to afford groceries and rent and tuition. Right now, he just had to be right here.

He stayed sitting and stretched for a few minutes, cracking his neck and at the end and feeling… different. Maybe ‘new’ was the right word. He felt good and it felt strange. It took a few moments to realize that he could see the catwalk now. He leaned forward to stare at it, his hand dropping beside his leg to take on some of his weight out of normal habit. The catwalk felt like set gelatin against his skin. It wasn’t sticky, just definitely there and offering a slight resistance to pressure.

The tiger definitely hadn’t been wearing clothing, but had walked the whole way from wherever he had started to where he ended with his head in Liam’s lap. Inanimate things like clothes and coins could only be what they were, but the bit of vague philosophy from a couple first and second year classes Liam didn’t really remember held the notion that people were constructs assembled through all their experiences. Maybe, with going through experiences in the grey, this place was becoming more real around him because it was becoming more real to him, like his clothes were real to him.

Or maybe he was becoming realer within the grey as his constructs about himself fell away. Maybe he was learning to exist in the now that the grey presented. Maybe he was unlearning his experiences in life and just existing without the pressure of the construct he’d worn; existing like the tiger.

He stood back up and started walking in the direction that felt like forward. He couldn’t remember which way he’d been going when he’d laid down, but this seemed like the right way to be going now. After three steps the familiar shunk sound thudded against his ears and everything went absolutely black. Liam stopped and, a slow smile spreading across his face as he settled the crook of his elbow to hide his eyes from the coming bright, listened to see if he could hear who or what was coming next.