Corey Lamb's Blog

After a lengthy process, I’m finally ready to present the first official trailer for “I Am Become Zombie”! I hope you guys enjoy it! Feel free to share, should your heart desire it.

“Angel,” a voice whispered from beyond the blackness. I opened my eyes. I was standing in an aisle of old books, completely alone. I took a step forward and realized, with an unfortunate wobble, I was wearing heels…and the black dress from Ethan.

“Hello?” I said, stupidly. There was no answer. I pressed myself against one of the bookshelves and peered over the edge, spotting nothing of significant relevance beyond another dozen rows of books. Somehow I had spontaneously ascended into an old, dust-ridden library.

I looked back down to the books in my own row, resting my eyes on Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. I pretended I hadn’t seen it. I wasn’t in the mood for metaphorical allusion, and the last thing I wanted to do was give the universe the satisfaction.

“Angel,” the voice whispered again. I knew I had heard it that time. I ran out from the book aisle and looked around the room. Somehow, it looked different than before. Smaller. Darker.

I walked toward one end of the room, eyeing each aisle as I passed, searching for whoever the hell was screwing with me. However, I didn’t see anything other than a few books and loose papers on the floor. And I wasn’t about to be baited into picking any of them up.

I reached the end of the room and craned my neck down the two opposing aisles along the wall. Nothing. So I turned back the other way. And nearly had a heart attack.

A slim man in a hoodie stood at the other end of the room, his face shrouded in darkness.

“Angel,” the voice said, almost growling this time.

Nope. Nope nope nope. Nope nope nopity fucking nope. He was fine where he was, on the other side of the library. In no version of this incident would I have the moronic sense to approach him and get shanked by the hook hands or scissor fingers hidden under those sleeves. Instead, I’d be staying put, ignoring whatever the hell that was.

“Angel,” he called again.

Nope. I grabbed the nearest book from the shelf and opened it to the middle. Don’t mind me. Just reading this here book.

“Angel!” the voice barked, causing me to involuntarily jerk my head up, just in time to catch the figure pulling the hood down from his head.

I dropped the book to the floor. It was my father.

“Dad?” I said, taking a step forward. He stepped backward, still staring at the ground. “Dad…is that you?”

The overhead light flickered. Because, you know, the situation wasn’t dramatic enough already.

“Dad.”

He lifted his head up from the floor to reveal a pair of pale white eyes sunken into his skull. He raised a finger to his lips, then turned his back to me, opening a door I hadn’t realized was there and stepping into the next room. I slowly walked forward, breaking into a hard pace after a few feet, and then an outright jog until I reached the open door. I stopped when I realized the adjoining room was flooded in darkness.

“Dad?” I asked, though notably more quietly than before. If it really was my dad in there…he needed to cut this shit out.

“Come with me, Angel,” his voice whispered.

I took a deep breath and stepped inside. The wooden door slammed shut behind me. Fuck this fucking day.

As I reached my arms out to feel around the blackness, a match was struck at the opposite end of the room, lighting an old oil lamp held by what appeared to still be my father. He walked away from me, down a hallway which clearly manifested itself out of nowhere.

With every cautious step, the backs of my heels echoed across the wooden floor. I ran my hand across the wall of the hallway, grazing picture frames and carvings far too dark to read. Something pungent hit my nose, causing me to nearly choke on my own spit.

“Where are we going?” I asked, trying my best not to inhale whatever the hell smelled like sour chicken.

“We’re going home, Angel.”

Home? Unless this was an elaborate tunneling system through the fabled underground of inner-city Chicago, I’m pretty sure we missed our turn.

“Dad, just talk to me!”

I stopped walking. This was ridiculous.

“We’re going home,” he repeated, turning to face me. He held the lamp just under his chin, low enough to black out the rest of his face above his smile.

“Raise the lamp,” I ordered, feeling the last word shake a bit as it left my mouth.

He dropped the lamp, letting it shatter as it hit the floor. At once, the hall was dark again. Perfect.

The only sound I could hear was my breathing, until I heard the footsteps. My dad, or whoever he was, was coming toward me. I felt around for my phone, when I remembered I was in the goddamn black dress and lacking pockets.

“Don’t come any closer!” I yelled as convincingly as I could. If this was Ethan’s doing, I’d be ripping him a new asshole.

“Angel,” a voice cried. But it wasn’t my dad’s. It was an elderly woman’s. Abigail’s.

An overhead light clicked on, revealing an empty room with just me and the woman I had escorted into the afterlife only hours ago, now standing three feet in front of me. She was still wearing her pink muumuu. She was still hunched over slightly. In fact, everything about her was exactly as I remembered…except for her eyes.

“Why didn’t you save me, Angel?” Abigail asked. The whites of her unblinking pupils burning into my own.

“W-what?” I replied, still attempting to figure out whatever kind of sadistic bullshit I had stumbled into.

“You didn’t save me, Angel. Why did you let me die?”

I took a step back. This was too much. Where was Ethan?

Abigail moved closer.

“Tell me why you let me die.”

“I, uh—you wanted to go, right?”

“Why did you kill me, Angel?”

I took two more steps backward, when a second voice called out from behind me.

“I didn’t want to go,” Joseph said. I spun around to face Pizza Hut’s white-eyed delivery man, sobbing as he held a box of pepperoni-pineapple. “I would have done anything. You let him kill me. You let him murder me.”

“No, I—” I began, hoping to find a way to reason with the dead pizza guy.

“You did,” a third voice boomed. I turned to see my large alleyway attacker leaning against the wall. “Just like you murdered me.”

“Oh, come on!” I yelled. “You tried to strangle me. You tried to kill the other guy. You deserved it!”

“Did I deserve it, Angel?” Abigail asked. “Is that why you took me?”

“What did I do?” Joseph asked, stepping closer to me. “Tell me what I did!”

“Would everyone just shut up?!” I screamed, raising my hands as a form of shield from their dead souls. “I didn’t ask for this! I didn’t want any of this!”

“Are you going to kill me too, Angel?” Dad’s voice asked. I turned again to find him standing in the only unoccupied direction of the room. He was holding the golden watch in his hand. It was ticking.

“Stop it,” I demanded.

“Are you going to walk me into the shadows? Tell me everything will be alright?”

“Shut up.”

“But you don’t know if it will be alright. Do you, Angel?”

“I said stop!”

“Maybe your mother is there, Angel. Maybe we can look for her. Together.”

“No!”

“Angel?”

“NO!”

“Angel!”

“NOOOOO!”

I woke up, jerking myself up as my dad grasped my shoulder. I clenched my hand around his arm, panting. I was back in my room. In my bed.

“You alright?” Dad asked, letting go of my shoulder. “You were yelling.”

“I’m—yea, I’m—I’m okay. Bad dream.”

“You wanna let up on that death grip, killer?” he laughed. I looked to his arm and immediately let go, not realizing I had even grabbed it. It was dark in my room, apart from my bedside lamp. I’d been asleep for a few hours.

“So I was thinking Chinese for tonight. Yen’s?”

I looked to my closet, then to the mini trash can next to my bed. Ethan’s note was still wadded at the bottom, just under the plastic wrapping of an oatmeal cream pie.

“Sorry. Yea. Yen’s is cool.”

“Anything special?”

Everything was coming together again. I had dreamed the whole thing. This was my dad. My real dad. Everything was fine. Everything was okay.

“No chicken,” I said.

Dad smiled and stood from my bedside. “No chicken, it is.”

He walked out, flipping the light switch on as he left. I threw my head back into my pillow, giving a small laugh as I thought about everything.

“What’s so funny?” Ethan asked. He was standing in the corner of the room with his hands in his pockets, eyeing me curiously.

“Get out,” I demanded from under my breath, lifting myself from my bed.

“Now how’s that any way to treat your boss?”

“Get the hell out of here, Ethan,” I hissed though my teeth. “I’m eating Yen’s with my dad, and we’re having a normal night.”

“What’s Yen’s?”

“Seriously, Ethan. Not now.”

“You don’t even know why I’m here.”

“What’s to know? Someone died, or someone’s going to die, or someone already died and they’ve come back to guilt-trip me into thinking I murdered them, even though it’s all a bunch of shit. Everything’s shit.”

“Jesus, what kind of dreams are you having?”

“Just—I don’t want to hear it.”

“It’s the last job of the night, Angel. Last one ever, if you remember our deal.”

I covered my ears and walked to my bedroom door, ready to slam it shut behind me.

“He’s a rock star,” Ethan said.

I stopped walking and slowly spun around. “A rock star?”

Ethan nodded, showing his teeth again. “A rock star.”

I lowered my hands from my ears and straightened my shirt. If there was ever anything Ethan could say to persuade me…that was it.

I was going to meet…and kill…a goddamn rock star.

END OF CHAPTER FOUR

CHAPTER FOUR

I PULLED IN to the fenced lot across the street from the apartment complex at four forty-nine, squeezing in between a sports car with a bashed fender and a dusty suburban from the nineties whose driver had clearly spent the subsequent twenty years doing anything but learning how to park. At the front of the lot was a familiar burnt-orange pickup, which meant Dad beat me home. A seventy-two Chevrolet C-10. The same model Bill Murray drove off that cliff in Groundhog Day.

“Home,” I yelled down the hall as I forced our apartment door open with my good shoulder. All the lights in the entrance hall were off, apart from a yellow glow coming from the kitchen, which meant Dad was being weird again. I locked the door behind me and rounded the edge of the hallway. As I guessed, my father was sitting on a barstool in the kitchen, wearing a headlamp and a thick set of magnifying glasses, which wouldn’t seem too out of place if my father wasn’t the most nearsighted son-of-a-bitch I’ve ever known. In his hand was a thin rusty screwdriver prodding away at something golden resting on the kitchen counter.

For as long as I’d been able to remember, my dad has tinkered. I’d call it a hobby, if he ever fixed anything. Maybe he likes taking things apart. He never really talks about it. It’s always just been a thing he’s done. Like shaving. Or changing out faulty lightbulbs. And it’s one of the things which reminded me I was home. It might seem silly, but it was probably the best thing I could have walked in on after the day I’d had.

“Hey,” I said, feeling myself smile at the sight of his shotty craftsmanship. It was a golden watch he’d been working on—or at least, it used to be. He’d decomposed the thing to a series of gears and screws scattered across the counter. At my voice, his head jumped up from the watch, and the dull beam of his secondhand headlamp caught me in the eye.

“Hey girl,” he said, smiling.

“Can you, um—” I began, raising a hand to shield my eye from the light. He stared for a brief second before realizing what I was asking.

“Oh! Sorry,” he laughed, turning the beam upward into the ceiling and leaving the rest of the kitchen in shadows as he spun around on the barstool to face me. “You can grab the light, hun.”

Without looking, I flipped the switch along the edge of the wall, lighting the semi-chandelier hanging just above the circular kitchen table. And I mean just above. The damn thing gave maybe six inches of dinner space between it and the glazed finish of my grandmother’s hand-crafted Christmas gift from the early nineties, which already felt a bit low to the ground to begin with. Sitting at our kitchen table in its current position usually brought forth a peculiar feeling of being simultaneously too large and too small to eat comfortably for anyone joining an Adams’ dinner party for the first time. But having survived the sensation for nearly a decade and a half, I happily took a seat, slumping down in my chair as I sighed.

“Didn’t expect to make it back before you,” my dad said, pulling the ridiculous glasses from his face. “You grab lunch or something?”

If by grab lunch he meant watch downtown Chicago’s cultural hodgepodge of dead souls pass into the shadows of the afterlife and great unknown, then yes I suppose I had grabbed some lunch on the way home.

“Yea,” I laughed, a bit more nervously than I had meant to.

I would have loved to tell my dad about Ethan. About Abigail and Joseph. I’d probably skip the part with the gun and the aggravated assault, but I’d tell him everything else. Sure, Ethan hadn’t mentioned keeping anything under wraps, but a small part of me knew I couldn’t tell my dad how I’d spent that afternoon. At least not yet. Beyond the tempting notion of finding out if he was crazy enough to believe the story, telling my dad that the afterlife is a dark place would be like telling a child Santa Clause isn’t real. I know where his mind would go, and in my heart of hearts, I couldn’t bear to put it there.

“And you didn’t bring anything back for your old man?” my dad joked, folding his arms across his chest.

I raised my hand and rubbed my fingers and thumb together, lifting an eyebrow. “It don’t grow on trees, dad.”

He laughed and unstrapped his headlamp, placing it on the counter next to his latest project.

“Whatcha got there?” I asked, gesturing to the cluster of mechanical bits at the edge of the sink.

He smiled, spinning back around and grabbing something off of the counter. He held it out to me, turning it a few times in his hand until I took it from him. It was a golden, circular shell with a notch at its side.

“Found her out on the sidewalk,” he said, looking extremely proud of himself. “Some kind of watch. A bit flashy, huh?”

I nodded, smiling as I ran my thumb across an engraving in the back. It was heavily cursive and a bit difficult to read through some minor scratching, but the letters E and A branded the casing, and I immediately knew why my dad had taken it home.

“It’s great Dad,” I said, handing it back to him. He placed it back in its position among the innards and turned back to me, smiling and nodding as his head fell toward the floor.

I noticed a plate on the opposite side of the sink, covered in crumbs and ketchup smears. As far as my dad knew, I had eaten a late lunch. In reality, I was fucking starving. I thought to my room, wondering if any stray potato-chip bags or oatmeal cream pies were hiding out on my dresser, or if any canned teas lay unopened beneath my bed. Ever since Dad banned sodas from the apartment, I found Brisk Raspberry to be the next best thing.

I stood from the table and grabbed Dad’s empty plate from the counter, rinsing it off in the sink and placing it carefully into our decade-old dishwasher that should have been taken out back and shot a few years back.

“Thanks, hun.”

“No problem,” I said, faking a yawn. “I think I might go nap for a bit. You gonna be alright here by yourself?”

Dad laughed, pulling his headlamp back down to his forehead again. “I’ll figure something out,” he said. He unfolded those dorky-ass glasses and slid them up his nose. I kissed him on the cheek and walked off to my room, flipping the kitchen light switch off almost instinctively and attempting to look as drowsy as possible while images of barbecued Pringles danced in my head.

I opened my door to find a black dress draped over my hauntingly tidied bed. My stomach dropped as I turned back to my dad at the other end of the apartment. He was nose-deep into the watch. I looked back to the dress and slowly crept into my room, pulling the door shut behind me and clicking on the lamp next to my bed. On the dress laid a small piece of what looked like receipt paper, fluttering against the French lacing with the air from my ceiling fan. It was a note, scribbled in thick black ink.

My end of the bargain

The letters were skewed and ran into each other a bit, but as someone with the handwriting of a caffeinated serial-killer, it might as well have been the Declaration of Independence.

I grabbed the dress and walked it to my closet, picking an unused hanger from the edge of the railing and hooking it through the neckline. I placed it in the back trenches of my closet, behind my junior prom dress and the fuzzy red Christmas sweater I had mistakenly worn to school last year, miscalculating the effect an embroidered “Ho Ho Ho” would have on my classmates.

I walked back to my bed, swiping the spare oatmeal cream pie from the edge of my night stand as I let myself fall backwards onto my pillow. I ripped the plastic wrapping from the pie and shoved the whole thing into my mouth in one go, thankful no one was around to see my lack of self-control. I stared at my ceiling as I chewed, though my ceiling had become a slideshow of moments with Abigail, Joseph, and the prick in the alley—each vanishing through the veil of blackness.

I swallowed the pie and closed my eyes, listening to the soft hum of my ceiling fan as the rest of the world slipped away.

“That was quite the show,” Ethan’s voice rang from the end of the alley. “Not the smoothest ride, but damn it if you didn’t pull it together for the home stretch. You ever shot a gun before?”

I shook my head, staring at the dumpster across from me and not at Ethan. Then, all at once, I started crying, though the word doesn’t quite justify what took place. Everything I’d been harboring from the moment I met Ethan spewed out of my face like a failed third-grade science project in the form of tears, mucus and loose strings of spit. I hadn’t cried in years, so it took me more than a moment to figure out what exactly was happening. I imagine the end result resembled a constipated infant who’d recently been pinched.

“Now, why do that?” Ethan asked, looking away from me, as if doing so would somehow make me stop. “What good is crying going to do? He’s long gone. He was a dirt bag, anyway.”

“It’s not him,” I said between sobs. “It’s…everything. I can’t handle this. It’s too much for me.”

“I thought you did a pretty good job,” Ethan said, reassuringly. “You’re not perfect, but you made it work. You got the job done, and that’s what counts.”

“Barely,” I said. “What if he got over the fence? What if he choked me out?”

“Did he?”

“Well…no. But he could have.”

“Anything could have happened, Angel. Anything always can happen. It’s how you handle what happens that means something. And you handled yourself well.”

I sniffled and raised a finger in the air, waving it around in sarcastic celebration.

“You did,” Ethan continued, raising his voice louder than before. “Whether you realize it or not.”

“Did you know what was going to happen?”

Ethan approached the dumpster and lifted the lid, peering inside for a brief moment. “Angel, I’m going to tell you something now that I rarely care to admit to anyone.”

He let the lid fall from fingertips, and he spun back to face me. “I never know what’s going to happen,” he said, his hand still curled in the air from lifting the dumpster lid. “It’s all one lucky roll of the dice.”

I wiped my mouth and dabbed my nose. “Do you ever feel like you rolled snake eyes?”

Ethan smiled. “If I do, I just bump the table and hope the guy in the flashy vest is looking the other way.”

It was the first time Ethan genuinely made me laugh, even if it was between snivels.

“There she is,” Ethan said, walking up to me. He helped me up out of the puddle and picked a piece of rotting tomato off of my sundress with the tips of his fingers.

“I used to like this dress,” I said, eyeing the various stains I’d obtained from the edge of the dumpster.

“Oh, it’s not so bad,” Ethan said, pulling a shred of lettuce off of me and flicking it to the ground. “What do you say we get you home?”

He placed a hand on my shoulder and gestured to where the open end of the alley was. But we were no longer standing in downtown Chicago. We were at my car, just in front of Rush University Medical Center.

I’ve never been so happy to see that pile of junk. I approached it cautiously, opening the door as if a family of panthers was waiting inside, ready to pounce. If Ethan accomplished anything that day, it was instilling the fear in me that nothing was what it seemed, and at any given moment, I might be thrust into a situation better suited for a SWAT team or a professional hang-glider than a jumpy teenage girl with mood swings. But the door squeaked opened, and nothing burst into flames.

I slumped down into the driver’s seat to find my keys waiting in the ignition, which answered a question I had not yet remembered to ask. I turned them, expecting Ethan to appear on the passenger side with a new way to ruin whatever was left of my sanity. But he never showed. The radio flickered as the engine started, until four thirty-two appeared on the center screen. If I hurried, I could beat my dad home.

I shifted into reverse and crept out of the parking space, giving the hospital one last glance before pulling out of the lot, wondering how long it would be before I’d have to come back. Not long enough, if I was to guess.

The drive home proved to be far more bizarre than I had anticipated. The other drivers were no longer people. They were zoo animals. Wild creatures struggling to stay tame, unaware of what lies outside of their cage. I watched each as they passed, wondering which of them I’d seen before, or when I’d see them again. Which drivers would be Josephs, afraid to die and begging for a second chance? Which would be Abigails, walking arm-in-arm with me to the end? Who would run? Who would stay?

I had never felt so disconnected with the rest of the world. I suppose Ethan was right. It’s best not to dwell on it. Though certain questions were finding ways to linger in the back of my mind. For the first time, I was unnervingly aware of my own mortality.

If I die, will it be Ethan there, waiting for me?

Will I have the courage to go quietly?

END OF CHAPTER THREE

A set of footprints came sprinting down the alley, barely masked by the zipping sound of a set of wind-pants rubbing together. I looked up to see a pair of gym shoes splashing through a puddle just inside the two brick walls. They belonged to a young man with olive skin, probably in his early twenties. He floundered his way across the concrete, flailing his arms madly as he struggled to get away from whatever was chasing him. I jumped out of the way as he tore past me, seemingly determined to knock me down.

A second set of footprints rounded the corner. They belonged to a heavier-set man a few years older. He was wearing combat boots and bikers’ gloves, and his thick brown overcoat waved backwards as he pointed a pistol forward.

“Get back here, you little chicken shit!” his voice echoed down the alley as he ran right at me, because apparently, that’s what people were doing now. I lunged out of the way again, losing my balance at the landing and slapping my cold ass into the nearest puddle. Had there not been a gun involved, I might have yelled. Instead, I watched.

The first man reached the chain-length fence at the back of the alleyway. He jumped up in an attempt to climb it, but was pulled down to the concrete by the burly man, who then aimed the pistol dead center in the smaller man’s sweaty head.

“Look, I’ll give you whatever you want,” the smaller man said, raising his trembling hands. “Please.”

The large man gave a deep, guttural laugh. “I’ll tell ya sister you said hi.”

He pulled back the hammer of the firearm, smirking as the little man lowered his shaking head.

I cringed as a car backfired just outside the alley. The man with the gun turned his head up, apparently anticipating the same thing I had. The smaller guy looked up at the big man…and took his opportunity. All at once, he swatted the gun away from his forehead and landed a punch in the big guys—well—right in Bobby Dangler.  With the big guy hunched over, the smaller man lunged for the pistol, and in seconds, the two were rolling on the ground.

“Don’t you—” the big guy growled. “Don’t you even—”

But his sentence was cut short with a reverberating pop. The little guy stood up, breathing heavily. He wiped a hand across a gushing cut just above his right eye.

“I’ll tell her myself, dick bag.”

A beautiful one-liner, if I’ve ever heard one.

He popped off another shot in the big guy’s head and limped back to the front of the alley, lazily tossing the pistol into the dumpster and hobbling back out to the street. I looked back to the big guy. He was there, standing over his body, staring at his hands.

“What the f—what in the—” he stammered. After nudging his lifeless corpse a few times, he looked back down the alley. And then at me. Which is when I realized I was still sitting in alley-water.

“What is this?” his deep voice boomed. “What—what is this?”

I searched for Ethan again.

The burly man stomped toward me like a bull who’d seen red. “Did you see him? Where did he go?”

I crawled backwards, until I was up against the adjacent wall. Can he hurt me?

“Ethan!” I called out. No answer. Of course.

The big guy picked me up and pinned me against the wall like a ragdoll.

“ETHAN!” I belted, desperately. Still nothing.

I was on my own.

“I know you saw something, bitch!” he yelled at me. His breath smelled like rotten milk.

“You’re dead,” I said, my eyes clenched shut. “You died.”

“What?”

“The other guy shot you in the head. You’re dead now.”

He put a hand to my throat. Now would be the time to use some of that sorcerer shit Ethan liked to fuck around with. I’d drop this guy from The Vagina Building in a heartbeat.

“Dead?” the man breathed on me. I nodded, as well as I could with his baseball glove of a hand pressed against my neck.

He squeezed for a second, then dropped me to the ground. He gazed at his body bleeding out on the concrete, studying it for a moment before backing up away from me, a crazed look overcoming his face.

“Are you dead?” he asked. I shook my head, catching my breath. I looked to the open end of the alley. It was pitch black, with shadows spilling inward. I followed the darkness upward, watching it gently fade into the contrasting bright sky.

I cleared my throat and stood to my feet. “You…go there,” I said, pointing to the darkness. The big guy looked to the dark void, staring momentarily before looking back to me. The wild look across his face warped into a vague smirk. He laughed. That deep, throaty laugh from before.

And he walked the opposite way.

“Hey!” I yelled. “You’re dead! Go die over there!”

But he continued to walk, ignoring me. He reached his body again and leaned down to pat the pockets. He removed a wallet, a wad of cash, and a zip-lock bag of clumpy white powder I’m guessing wasn’t laundry detergent. He pocketed each item in his overcoat and approached the fence, grabbing hold of several of the chain lengths with his gloved hands.

“You can’t climb that! You have to go into the—whatever that shadowy stuff is! You have to!”

“Not a chance, kid.”

He stepped up into the fence, climbing up a few inches.

Shit. What would Ethan do?

I was too small to force the brute into the blackness. I doubted I could persuade him. Hell, I didn’t even know what it was I’d be persuading him to do. Move on? He didn’t seem too eager.

He stepped up another couple of inches. His arm reached the top of the fence.

Ethan would probably just demon-magic him to the other side. But I didn’t have demon-magic. All I had was—

I thought back to the skinnier man who shot him. He put two bullets in him and ran off, throwing the gun…

…in the dumpster.

I ran and lifted the plastic fold, lurching myself over the edge as much as I could, and I felt for the gun, grazing several slices of moldy pizza and something wet I’d rather not dwell on before finally gripping the handle of the pistol. I leaned backwards and slid out from beneath the plastic lid, streaking my sundress with something unfortunately brown in the process. But I’d have time to gag about it later.

I ran to the fence and pulled back the hammer. And God, I hoped I had done it right.

“Freeze!” I yelled, racking my brain for a clever CSI zinger. Freeze was the best I could do.

And much to my amazement, he froze.

“That’s right,” I said, letting myself slip deeper into the role of the afterlife’s law enforcement. “Come down. Nice and easy.”

“You said I’m dead, lady!” the man barked. “What’s a gun gonna do to me?”

Doing the first thing to pop into my head, I pressed the barrel up into the crevasse of his ass. “You sure you wanna find out? I’ve had a pretty shitty day…bitch.”

He stood motionless for a few seconds, clearly weighing his options. Then, coming to a healthy decision as I pushed the barrel further into his ass cheeks, he slowly climbed back down.

“That’s my gun, isn’t it?” he asked.

“It’s mine now.”

I gently unsheathed the pistol, keeping it pointed at him as he stepped away from the fence with his hands in the air. I backed against the wall and gestured with the gun to the darkness at the end of the alley.

“Go on.”

He stepped toward the open end of the alley, slowing his pace as he passed me, watching me carefully.

I raised the gun to his head.

“Whoa, take it easy,” he said, lifting his hands up higher. “I’m walking.”

“Walk faster.”

“So you’re like, what? Ghost police?”

“Yep.”

“Where am I going?”

“To Hell, hopefully.”

At these words, he stopped moving. One of his fingers twitched as the edge of his mouth curled.

I pointed the gun at his chest with both hands, shaking.

He started to turn away from me slowly, lowering his arms a bit. Then, he planted his foot and pounced at me. Before I knew it, I pulled the trigger, ripping a hole through the man’s shoulder and dropping him to the ground. I couldn’t breathe.

“You little…fuckin…” the man mumbled, clutching his bullet wound and grinding his teeth as a jagged oval of blood spread across the front of his shirt.

“I SAID GO!” I roared, aiming at his face.

The prick rolled over onto his stomach, lying there for a moment. He pushed his good arm into the ground in an effort to stand again. But I wasn’t going to give him the chance.

I raised the gun in the air and started firing, causing the man to fall back to the ground. Without hesitation, he scrambled into the void as I emptied the clip into the sky, screaming with every eardrum-shattering squeal I could muster as my hands flooded with the heat of the pistol.

After several clicks, I opened my eyes. I threw the gun at the wall and fell to the ground, my ass splashing back into the same puddle as before. I started breathing again, in tight choppy breaths, which were interrupted by an exaggerated slow-clap starting at the fence-end of the alleyway.

I didn’t need to look to know it was Ethan. That son of a bitch.

CHAPTER THREE

“HOW DO YOU do it?” I asked Ethan as we sat on the rickety sidewalk bench just outside of Abigail’s apartment complex. “How do you ever get used to people like her?”

“You never fully do,” Ethan said, interlocking his fingers as he stared down at the concrete. “You just have to find ways to separate yourself from them.”

I glanced across the street at the men and women navigating the walkways. Coming from work. Running late for work. Taking their children to the park, or picking them up from school. Living perfectly normal days, each of them. Any one of them could be next.

“Best not to dwell on it too much,” Ethan continued, leaning back in his seat to face the opposite sidewalk. I wondered if we were thinking the same thing.

I pulled down at the tail of my sundress as I scooched into the fold of the bench, eyeing each passerby and wondering what might kill each of them. I’d given at least four or five the bubonic plague before I realized what it was I was doing.

“So,” I started, deciding it best to strike up conversation with Ethan before I stuck the passing taxi driver with hypothetical diabetes. “How long have you—uh—been in the business?”

Ethan smiled, still focused on the sidewalk across the street.

“Long enough,” he said. Whatever the hell that meant.

“Ah.”

Ethan leaned forward, locking his wrinkled fingers again as bench creaked under his weight. “I was your age when I started. I’d just had my eighteenth birthday, and my father—he, um—he was in an accident.”

He paused, shuffling his fingers around a bit and lowering his head. I opened my mouth to say something, but Ethan pressed on.

“He was a construction worker on a project downtown. The Crain Communications building, if you know it. The big diamond-shaped one.”

I did know it. There was no way to miss it, if you lived in Chicago. To the conservative mind, it may very well look like a diamond. But to the rest of us, it was the Vagina Building, because, well—it looked like a vagina. Vertical slit and all. I always imagined the design was purposeful—a progressive alternative to an otherwise architecturally dick-riddled city. Or maybe it was just a fucking diamond. Were it any other conversation, I might have made an effort to find Ethan’s position on the matter. But while my subconscious had a knack for digging up all of the inappropriate shit from the back of my brain and throwing it up on display for the rest of my mind…I could read a room.

“Yea, I know it.”

Ethan nodded. “He was walking through some of the framework without a hardhat. And something fell. The funeral was a few days later.”

Ethan looked up again, furrowing his graying brow. “A man was there. A dark man. And the only dry eye in the room.”

“My mom died when I was little,” I said after a lengthy bout of silence. “I barely remember her. And my dad…I love him, but…he’s not all there. You know, up here.”

I tapped the side of my head with my finger.

“I suppose he wouldn’t be,” Ethan said.

“I mean, he’s not like…I wouldn’t send him to the funny farm or anything. He just kinda lives in his own world. I guess I do too, sometimes.”

I stared back to the people crossing the sidewalk, when the scent of Axe body spray overpowered the subtle aroma of cabbage and wet socks surrounding the bench. I flinched backward as a bicyclist sped past the two of us, nearly clipping the side of my face with his handlebar as the spokes of his tires clicked by. Unsurprisingly, Ethan didn’t move.

“Watch it, asswipe!” I yelled as he peddled away. “Can he see us? Did he see me?”

“Who knows,” Ethan laughed. “It’s hard to tell sometimes.”

“How do you not know?”

“There are more important things to worry about.”

Ethan checked his watch again. “And speaking of which…we’re up.”

He jumped to his feet and held out a hand for me to take. I checked my phone. Four twelve. Dad would be home soon. I sighed, grabbing Ethan’s hand, which swallowed my own. He lifted me to my feet, and I was suddenly standing in a narrow alleyway, in between two rusted rain gutters and a stammering window unit. I was all alone, the bottoms of my shoes soaking in a puddle of water which rippled with the passing wind. The adjacent buildings blocked most of the sun, and a light chill ran down my back.

“Ethan?” I called out, stepping across the cracked concrete, which looked a bit like an unfinished jigsaw puzzle. Careful not to catch the back of my shoes in the broken drainage grate, I approached the obligatory alley dumpster, which echoed with the scurries of whatever lay trapped inside.

“Hello?” I said to the dumpster, pressing an ear lightly against the aluminum. Nothing.

I lifted the plastic lid and spoke into the dumpster, like an idiot. “Hello?”

And that’s when I heard the gunshot.

He was sitting in an old wooden chair in the corner of the room, lightly rocking while staring at the queen-sized wooden headboard along the opposite wall, lit only by the dimming sunlight spilling in from one of the broken window blinds. Against the headboard lay an elderly woman beneath a set of white floral-pattern sheets. She was on her back, with her head slightly propped up by an extra pillow.

“What…the hell…was that?” I managed to choke out to Ethan, who had stopped rocking to check his watch.

“Butterfingers,” he said, grinning.

I felt my fists tightening. My teeth grinding. The vein in my forehead ready to burst from my skin like an alien parasite.

“You dropped me from a building, you son of a bitch.”

Ethan raised a finger to his lips, then pointed to the unconscious woman. As if on cue, she cracked open her eyes, rubbing them softly as she lifted herself upright. She looked at me first, no doubt puzzled by the hysterical teenage girl standing in her bedroom. And then she turned to Ethan. I waited for shouting or panic at the sight of intruders, or something similar to Joseph’s pleading outburst at the hospital. But the woman was oddly calm, budging only to retrieve a pair of glasses from the nightstand nearest the bed.

“Well, hello there,” she said, sliding the glasses up her nose as she relaxed against her pillows. You’d think she was greeting the mailman.

“Hello, Abigail,” Ethan replied, rocking in the chair again.

“I don’t believe we’ve had the pleasure,” Abigail said.

“I’m here to take you from this world, my dear. It’s time.”

Abigail stared at Ethan over the rim of her glasses. After a moment of consideration, she gave a light huff, seemingly more in realization than annoyance. “I wondered if you’d be coming soon. Can I say goodbye?”

Ethan nodded once. “They won’t be able to hear you. But you can see them before you go.”

Abigail smiled and inched her way out of the bed, revealing a pink muumuu frilly enough to have been stitched together by hand. Ethan stood and helped her to her feet, then escorted her slowly toward the door. I stepped aside as the woman smiled at me. It was one of those old people close-lipped smiles that make you wonder if they really know why they’re smiling, or if they’ve just had to smile at so much shit in their years that it’s formed itself into something of a responsive habit. I smiled back.

Before leaving the bedroom, the woman turned back to her bed. There, lying motionless beneath the sheets, was a second Abigail. After lingering on the undeniably jarring sight, the first Abigail turned back to the doorway, and Ethan walked her out through the hall and into the nearest room. I stood alone in the bedroom for a moment, until I looked back to Abigail’s body. Then I got the fuck out.

I hurried into the next room with Ethan and Abigail. A younger, middle-aged couple was asleep in the bed. The man was snoring loud enough to wake the neighbors, though the woman, who heavily favored Abigail, seemed to be unaffected by the noise.

Abigail first approached the man, who slept closest to the door. She ran a shaky hand through his brown hair, petting it a bit before leaning down and kissing him on his forehead.

“Thank you, Henry,” she whispered.

Ethan took her hand again, walking her around the bed to the woman, who was lying on her back with her head slightly propped up by an extra pillow. Abigail took the woman’s hand and squeezed it gently as a single tear fell down her cheek. Ethan took a step back from her and lowered his head.

Abigail clasped her other hand around the sleeping woman’s and brought it to her lips, kissing it as a second tear fell. She then crouched to kiss the woman’s face, sniffling a bit in the process.

“Goodbye Rosie,” she sobbed. “You’ll always be my little angel.”

Alright. That one got to me.

Ethan patted Abigail’s back, taking her hand again as she turned from the sleeping woman.

“Are you ready?”

Abigail patted her face with the sleeve of her muumuu.

“Almost.”

Abigail led Ethan out the door and down the hallway, stopping at a framed set of pictures hanging on the wall. And because of my apparent emotional masochism, I followed.

At the top left corner of the frame was a picture of the man and woman from the bedroom, maybe twenty years prior. The woman had her arms wrapped tight around the man, who was much thinner than he had been. On his shoulders sat a baby boy in a Bugs Bunny t-shirt, clutching onto his father’s ears for support. Just below that was a nearly identical photo, though noticeably much older. The man in this photo was taller than the first and sported a full beard. The woman could have been the first’s twin. And instead of a baby boy sitting on the man’s shoulders, a child with wavy blonde locks in a pink onesie sat gripping what she could hold of the man’s thinning hair.

Abigail stared at the bottom photo and smiled again. She looked to the end of the hallway, which I now realized was much longer than before and ended in a shadowy doorway, similar to what I saw with Jacob at the hospital.

“I’m ready,” Abigail said quietly.

Ethan took her hand and walked her toward…me.

“Abigail, Ethan said softly, “I’d like you to meet Angel. She’ll be taking you from here.”

“Whoa,” I protested, stepping back. “I don’t—I can’t be the one to—”

“It’s nice to meet you, dear.”

“Angel,” Ethan said with a hint of his usual, more forceful tone. “Abigail needs you right now. It’s just a walk.”

But it wasn’t just a walk. It was a stroll to the grave. A bitter creep to the end of the line. I couldn’t do it. Not me.

I bit my lip, having difficulty deciding which person I’d be better off explaining myself to.

“It’s okay, honey,” Abigail said, placing a hand to my shoulder. “We can make it quick.”

The statement had a way of wrenching my insides. Here she was, in her final moment, willing to cut it short for me. I thought back to Joseph and his offer to adopt a child to stay put. Now this woman wants to leave, and I’m too—what, afraid to let her?

I looked to Ethan, who gave a slow nod.

“So just…the doorway, then?” I asked.

“That’ll do it,” Ethan said.

I glanced at Abigail again, who smiled tenderly. I took her hand, ready to vomit that morning’s yogurt bowl all over the wooden floor at the implication of what I was doing…

And I walked her down the hallway.

She was no longer lingering on the pictures along the wall. She just stared at the open doorway shrouded in darkness. We paused at the end of the hall, where I let go of her hand.

“Thank you, dear,” she said to me. And then she disappeared.

CHAPTER TWO

WHEN I SAY I sprinted through that labyrinth of hospital hallways, I mean I trucked ass. I’ve never ran so hard from anything in my life, minus maybe my Aunt Janice’s rabid Chihuahua who chased me up a tree three Christmases ago. But even then, Mr. Boo Bear lost interest after spotting that squirrel at the far end of the backyard. I can’t say I’d imagine Ethan doing the same.

And yet, as I rounded the corner into the lobby, Ethan remained nowhere to be seen. I ran past the receptionist, quite possibly giving her the dirtiest of my “go to hell” looks as she sipped daintily on her purple coffee thermos while refusing to glance even momentarily at the potentially crazed woman panting her way through the room. But it didn’t matter. I’d get to my car and get the hell outta dodge before—

Wait a tick.

I had run out the hospital entrance, but I wasn’t in the parking lot. For some fucked up reason, I was running along the ledge of a building downtown. Did I black out? Panicked, I stopped dead in my tracks, struggling to find my balance again at the corner of the roof’s eight-inch safety wall. And the wind was blowing hard.

“Yea, we’re going to have to have a talk,” Ethan’s voice called from behind me as I stopped wavering and found my footing. I slowly turned to see Ethan standing on the concrete walkway of the roof, a safe distance from accidentally falling to his death. He wasn’t smiling anymore. He just stood there, his hands clasped behind his back.

“And by that I mean, I’m going to talk, and you’re going to listen,” he continued. The air was painfully thin, and I was beginning to feel lightheaded, which explained why there was two of him vibrating back and forth.

“You can’t just spit in my face and expect to be rid of all of this, Angel. That’s not how it works.”

I started to step down from the ledge, prompting Ethan to take a giant step toward me, which made me pull my foot back.

“You are a Reaper of Souls now. You gather the dead, and you push them along. You agreed to it, Angel. You agreed to work for me.”

Ethan’s tone had now evolved to emulate that of a father annoyed with his five-year-old daughter for not eating her broccoli.

“I thought you were the manager of Dress Barn!”

“We had a deal. You took the dress.”

“Take it back!” I screamed incredulously.

“You’re a Reaper, Angel. Just…try to understand what that means. Not just to yourself, but to the city.”

“NO! I don’t understand shit!” I yelled, wobbling at the intensity of my delivery of the word shit.

Ethan sighed, checking his watch. Maybe if I argued with him long enough, he’d just leave.

“Alright Angel,” he said, putting his hands into his pockets and bobbing up and down on his toes. “What’s it going to take?”

“Why are you still talking to me?!” I barked, looking around for any other spot to run to.

“Angel, listen!” he yelled over the wind. “What’s it going to take for you to finish out the day?”

“Nothing!”

“Just the day, Angel. That’s the new deal, okay?”

“No!”

Ethan rubbed a hand across his face. Then, without missing a beat, he stormed up to the ledge, causing me to sway backwards. Ethan jumped up and caught me by the arm, holding me in place as I bowed over the edge of the building. Against my better judgement, I looked down. Holy fucking shit. The cars were like skittles. I took a deep breath and closed my eyes tight.

“Do we have a deal?” Ethan asked calmly.

I jerked my head to face him and opened my eyes. “You can’t be serious.”

He leaned down a bit, lowering me further. “Try me,” he said.

I slowly looked back down to the urban abyss. The people were grains of sand.

“Okay, pull me up,” I said, turning back to Ethan. “Pull me up, pull me up, pull me up!”

“Do we have a deal?” he repeated, squinting at me with his crow’s feet.

“Yes, yes, yes! Deal! Reaper! Pull me up!”

Ethan showed his teeth again. Right before he let go of my hand.

It all happened fast, I’m sure. But what I saw unfolded dramatically slow, with Enya’s “Only Time” streaming in my head, picking up immediately at the first verse as I fell backwards from Ethan’s hand. I watched as he waved, shrinking into obscurity as stories of windows flew upward. What was the point of it all? Why go through the trouble just to kill me?

I turned to face the pavement, realizing I would probably land smack in the middle of a ketchup smear and a half-eaten hot dog I was looking at. Or if I was lucky, I’d hit the double-parked Corvette.

I decided to just close my eyes and let the impact surprise me.

This was it. This was how it all was going to end. What’s worse…everyone was going to think I fucking jumped.

I didn’t want to die.

I took a deep breath and waited for something to crush my skull. Only, it never did. Instead, I found myself shaking in the middle of a small bedroom, only opening my eyes after a voice told me to stop screaming. And it belonged to Ethan.

Ethan pulled me in through the entrance. I put up a fight, but somehow not enough to catch the receptionist’s attention.

“Help!” I screamed. “He’s kidnapping me!”

The receptionist clicked away on her computer screen, unfazed by my outburst.

“You work at a fucking hospital!” I yelled between struggles. “You’re supposed to help people! Help me, goddamnit!”

“She can’t hear you,” Ethan said. “And neither can he.”

I kicked and screamed past one of the guards, whose attention seemed to be greater spent on using his thumbs to dislodge something from behind his molar.

Ethan led me down the bright hallway and around the corner, through a set of double-doors and beyond the visitors’ threshold. Everyone we passed seemed to be far too entranced with their own bland existences to help the distressed teenage girl being dragged across the floor by the creepy asshole sorcerer. Or at the very least, acknowledge the incident.

“Here we are,” Ethan said, striding into the emergency room. He steered me past the information desk and into one of the back corners. Ethan pulled the white curtain back to reveal a mangled body lying on a bed and breathing through a tube, and he let go of my hand.

I stared, fixated on the injured man. I hadn’t the slightest idea why we were there. If I wanted to see that shit, I had HBO.

In moments, the poor bastard flat-lined. One of the nurses ran inside, ignoring Ethan and I as she called for help. Several doctors joined her, until a small congregation separated us from the dying man.

“Hello, Joseph,” Ethan said, looking just past me at the back wall. I turned to see a clean-cut balding man standing in the corner, looking at the hospital bed. He was wearing a Pizza Hut polo, buttoned to the neckline. He turned to face Ethan, a look on his face like my dad’s when he found that chicken beak. He wasn’t alone.

“Who are you?” Joseph asked, looking from Ethan to me, then back to the nest of doctors.

“Can’t you guess?” Ethan asked, smiling.

Joseph looked back to me, then to Ethan again. “Where am I?” he asked.

“Well, that’s a complicated question,” Ethan laughed. “You see, part of you is laying on that bed there. And the other part…well, that’s why I’m here. It’s not looking so good for the part of you on the bed, Jo.”

Joseph looked down to his hands, then to me again, then back to the hospital bed.

“I’m not—” Joseph began, taking a deep breath. “I don’t—understand.”

“Come on, Jo—” Ethan said. “What’s the last thing you remember?”

“I, uh—I was driving. Taking a pizza to some lady. Pepperoni and pineapple.”

“Egh. Probably for the best that wasn’t delivered, am I right?” Ethan said.

“And—” Joseph began, but stopped and swallowed. His eyes widened as he seemed to have put the pieces together, which was something I was having equal trouble accomplishing.

“No!” Joseph yelled, trying to shove the doctors out of the way. “No! No, I can’t be! I can’t!”

Ethan sighed and checked his watch again. “Yep, you’re dead,” Ethan said, in the way you’d tell a friend his mother called. “No two ways about it.”

Dead? I repeated it in my head. This man is…dead?

Joseph ran to Ethan, pulling on his coat. “No, I need to go back. I’ll quit my job. I’ll join the church. Episcopalian. I’m not ready for this. I—I’ll adopt an orphan. I’ll send money to those Venezuelans on television. I’m not ready!”

Ethan calmly removed Josephs shaking hands from his coat, then brushed the collar off. “Pull yourself together, Jo. I’m sure you’ll be fine.”

“What do you mean, I’ll be fine?” Joseph panicked, “What’s going to happen to me?”

“A little of this, a little of that. I’m not exactly sure, myself. Probably nothing too bad.”

“Probably? What the hell do you mean, probably?”

“I mean, probably. What do you want me to say?”

Joseph sat down on the floor, pulling at his hair a bit. “…it came out of nowhere.”

“I know, Jo,” Ethan said, sitting down on the floor next to him. “It always does.”

Joseph started crying, then looked up at me again. “Who’s she?”

I opened my mouth, but not before Ethan could cut me off. “She’s in training. New hire.”

Joseph gave a half-hearted laugh. And then another. I don’t know what was so goddamn funny.

“See, there you go,” Ethan said, smiling as he put an arm around Joseph’s shoulder. “Now, what do you say we get out of here?”

Joseph sniffled a bit and wiped his nose. “Alright,” he groaned, trembling.

Ethan gave Joseph one of those soft chin-punches that seemed to say “cheer up” in nineteen-eighties gesture-speak. He then stood up and pulled Joseph to his feet. “On you go,” Ethan said, pointing to one of the open doorframes. All I could see was black space.

Joseph took a step, then looked back to me. I couldn’t think of anything profound to say, so I waved. Like a jackass. Still, Joseph smiled and walked ahead. Ethan smacked him on the ass and said “good game, champ,” giving Joseph a bit of a skip to his step. The whole thing was fucking bizarre.

“And he was never seen again,” Ethan said, watching as Joseph disappeared into the black void. I looked back to the hospital bed. Several doctors were removing their facemasks and gloves. Time of death…three oh-seven.

“You think the psych-ward could pencil me in?” I asked Ethan, feeling a bit like what I imagine the kid in The Sixth Sense must have been going through when he saw that dead woman in his kitchen rifling through the cabinets.

Ethan walked up and placed an arm around me. “You won’t have time,” he said. “You’ve got a busy day.”

“So, are you Death?”

“I’m Ethan.”

“And you killed that guy.”

“I didn’t kill him. Weren’t you paying attention? He was already dead. I helped him move on. You don’t want them all lingering around after the fact.”

“I think I’m losing my mind.”

“Angel…everything you saw was very real.”

“So why can’t anyone see us? Am I dead, too?”

“No, no. Of course not.”

“So what am I? What are you?”

“You are an employee. And you can think of me as your manager.”

“I quit.”

“What?”

“I quit. You said I could quit. I. Quit.”

“Don’t quit.”

“I motherfucking quit. I quit so hard.”

“Okay, you quit?”

“I. QUIT.”

“Fine,” Ethan said, pulling an elaborate black pocket watch from his coat pocket. “Three oh-eight,” he said, as if he just clocked-in a runner’s lap time. “You can go ahead and follow your buddy Jo there through that door.”

I felt my jaw drop. “What?”

Ethan shooed me away with his hand. “Go on.”

“Are you kidding me?”

“You quit, right?”

“You said I could!”

“And you can,” Ethan said, placing an arm around my shoulder again. “So go.”

He pointed back to the black door space.

I shook him off, staring at the blackness. “That’s how it is, then? I quit, I die?”

“Look, I don’t make the rules. I just—”

I gritted my teeth and took a meaty swing at that slimy fuck, who ducked just in time. He popped back up quick and grabbed my wrist before I could take a second shot.

“Like nobody’s ever tried that one before,” he said. So I spat at him, catching him right on the side of his smug fucking face. Suddenly, his smile warped into disgust.

“Let go of me,” I demanded, to which he surprisingly complied. Not one to waste time in these hostage situations, I sprinted away, glancing behind me at the entrance of the hospital wing.

Ethan was gone.

(END OF CHAPTER ONE)

“Whoa, there. Pump the breaks,” I said, raising a hand in defense. The once-bright teal of my fingernails was faded and chipped, and I hate that I remember that.

“I offered you a job,” Ethan said coolly. “And you accepted.”

“I accepted a job with Dress Barn.”

“I never said Dress Barn.”

“But you…I…alright, then I’m outta here.”

It was a monumental waste of my time to argue. I turned and stormed out of Dress Barn, shaking my head at how stupid I had been. That geriatric hairbag.

“Don’t forget your dress,” Ethan said to me as I rounded the corner of the entrance. He was standing outside, holding the dress over his arm, like he had been waiting for hours. I spun back to face the interior of the store, then back to Ethan, whose teeth were out again. I was losing my damn mind.

“Keep it,” I said, pushing past him and on to my car.

I pulled the keys from my pocket, clicking open the door to my ’09 Sebring. I fell into the seat and shoved the key into the ignition, steaming angry.

“It’s yours, whether you want it or not,” Ethan said from the passenger seat. I nearly choked to death on nothing. I swear the door hadn’t opened. In fact, as I looked to the corner just below the passenger window, the lock was still in place.

“That was the deal,” Ethan finished.

“How—in the hell—” I said, gasping for breath.

“We’re about to become great friends, you and I,” Ethan said, laying the dress in my lap.

“Who are you?” I asked, staring into his black eyes.

Ethan smiled. “I think it’s best if I show you.”

I said nothing, still racking my brain for a reasonable explanation of Ethan’s wizardry. He’s a goddamn twin. There’s one still back at Dress Barn. And another leaning on that wall. Several twins. No, triplets. But how did he get in my car? Okay, they’re a set of burgling triplets.

“Drive,” Ethan ordered, reaching and turning the key over in the ignition, starting my car.

“Excuse me?”

“Drive…or I will.”

I laughed, equally in doubt and fear. “Yea. I don’t think so.”

Ethan sighed and pointed to the gear stick, and it shifted itself into reverse. What the bloody fuck. I stomped on the brake, leaning my body as far away from that warlock as I could. The tires started spinning as Ethan’s long finger remained pointed. I could do nothing but scream.

Where are the fucking people around here?

A cloud of burnt rubber engulfed the Sebring, until all I could see was a thick patch of gray, which darkened with each passing second.

“Okay!” I yelled over the squealing. “I’ll drive! Just stop!”

The tires instantly quit spinning, and the stick shifted back into park. Ethan then curled his shitty finger back into his shitty hand. “The corner of Magnolia and Lockwood,” Ethan’s deep voice boomed.

I took a second to compose myself, processing the fuckery afoot, when the gear stick shifted back into reverse.

“Jesus, I’m fucking going!” I said, throwing a hand to the shifter. The vehicle crawled backwards as I pulled out of the Dress Barn lot. Ethan checked his watch again.

“You’re going to kill me, aren’t you?” I asked, looking over to Ethan. He was staring out the window at nothing in particular.

“No,” he said. I waited for him to elaborate. He didn’t.

“Then what are we doing?”

“Magnolia and Lockwood.”

“Are you going to tell me how you do that weird shit?”

“Yes.”

I cleared my throat. “Really?” I asked in disbelief. He didn’t answer. He just nodded.

“Turn here,” he said once we reached Magnolia Avenue, as if I was an idiot. I grew up on Chicago’s coastline. I raced pink Tiny Toon Adventures and Rocket Power bicycles up and down Magnolia Avenue for years, back when pigtails were cute and Dress Barn was Blockbuster Video. I could get to Lockwood Drive with my eyes closed, though I wasn’t about to give Ethan any ideas.

“Why don’t you just tell me where we’re going?” I asked, interrupting my more fearful thoughts. This prompted the steering wheel to turn on its own, veering the vehicle toward Rush University Medical Center. We were going to a hospital. I hated hospitals.

“Come with me,” Ethan said once the vehicle parked itself. He opened the passenger door and walked to the entrance, wasting no time waiting for me. I watched as he approached the automatic doors. That fucking swede.

I leaned over and slammed the passenger door shut, ready to peel out and leave all of the ridiculousness behind. I turned the key in the ignition…and nothing happened. I tried again. Nothing. Again. Again. Click. Click.

“Need a jump?” Ethan said, standing next to the driver-side door. The window was down.

“No, I—I was just—”

Ethan opened the door and pulled me up by my hand. He then reached in and yanked the key from the ignition. “We don’t have time. This way,” he said, pulling me behind him.

“You can’t—treat people like this,” I said, struggling to break free. “I have rights! I’ll sue! Do you hear me? My family sues everyone! I know how!”