Dead Investigations: An Afterlife Adventures Novel
Author: Jordaina Sydney Robinson
Date: 2023-01-30 05:00:00+00:00

This is a work of fiction. Similarities to real people, places, or events
are entirely coincidental.

JUST A TOUCH DEAD

First edition. March 15, 2016.

Copyright © 2016 Jordaina Sydney Robinson.

Written by Jordaina Sydney Robinson.

Edited by Sophie Playle

“This is exactly what happens when you try to be a responsible adult.” I shook my head in disgust as I looked down at my body.

My long, pillar-box-red hair fanned out around my head like a vibrant halo, my fringe artfully covering one eye. It looked great, really thick and shiny. Why couldn’t I get it to look like that normally? I looked closer. No, it wasn’t my hair, or it wasn’t just my hair, it was a rapidly spreading pool of blood from the back of my head colouring the pavement. Huh. But at least my white Christian Dior trouser suit was blood free. I’d have died if that’d had any bloodstains on it. Oh, wait.

No, I couldn’t be dead. If I was dead I wouldn’t be floating around watching, I’d just be, well, dead. Right? And there was only really a smidgen of blood around my head. Barely an eggcupful. Or maybe a teacup. I crouched down to try to peer underneath my body. Okay, so it was more like a small bowlful, but my hair was helping it spread, that was why it looked worse. It must have been coming from my shoulder or something because if that much blood came from my head, I’d definitely be dead.

I glanced across my body at the bus driver. “I don’t know what you’re so upset about, I’m the one who’s bleeding to death over here.”

He was slouched on the road, his back against the front right tyre and his head in his hands, crying like a baby who’d just had their dummy confiscated by a mean nanny. I hated criers. I mean, for heaven’s sake, I was bleeding to death and I wasn’t crying about it. I looked down at my body again. Should I have been crying about it? I would be crying if that blood soaked into my suit. I loved that suit and blood never really came out.

“Have you called an ambulance?” a girl, who was maybe early twenties at a push, with heavily applied makeup and bright red lips called to a suited and booted older businessman at the front of the quickly gathering crowd.

“He just watched me get hit by a bus. Of course he’s called an ambulance, you idiot.” I waved to him. “You did, right?”

He nodded back at the girl, who knelt beside my body and started doing chest compressions. With it being summer the girl had teamed the smallest pair of denim shorts with a white racerback vest, which she wore pulled up and knotted under her small bust to show off her very toned abs. That’s what happened in England on the three sunny days we got a year that we laughingly called summer: everyone wore the least amount of clothes possible.

I watched her move, all elbows and bum in the air. It looked like she was doing a weird sort of push up on my chest. Admittedly, I’d only taken a short first aid course for my job as an event planner but I was fairly sure she was doing it wrong.

“Er, aren’t you going to checking if I’m breathing first? Maybe take my pulse?” I asked as I watched her throw a smile over her shoulder. I searched over her shoulder to see who the smile was for, and then I realised people were videoing the scene. She wasn’t trying to save me. She was playing to the cameras.

“Well, that’s just great. I’m in mortal peril and you’re angling for your fifteen minutes of fame.” I turned to the crowd. “Does anyone want to come and help her before she kills me? Is there a doctor here? Maybe a vet? I’d take an optician in a pinch.”

I turned back to see the girl put her ear to my mouth, listening for breath. She tipped my head back and pursed her lips.

“Don’t you do it. Don’t you smear that cheap-ass lipstick all over my face. That is Dior Lip Maximizer on my lips right there. Do you know how—” She put her mouth on my body’s mouth and I winced. “Ohhhh, you went and did it.” She must have been a sloppy kisser because her lipstick had marked at least a good centimetre around the outside of my lips. “Annnnnd now I look like a clown.”

She did some more bum waggling then swooped down for another kiss.

“Whoa, whoa, hold up there, missy. You’ve already messed up my makeup, last thing I need is for you to mess up my breathing.” I swiped my hand at her shoulder to knock her away and my hand went straight through her. She shivered, her mouth an inch from my body’s, and a brief ripple of nausea passed through me. I bent at the waist and took a few deep breaths. I did not want to vomit over my body. And who would vomit anyway? Would I vomit or would my body vomit? I was assuming this was just a temporary out-of-body experience since no brilliant white light had opened up for me, and I did not want to kill myself by choking on vomit.

She had her face an inch from my body so I tried to push her away again but my hand plunged into her chest. “Well, that’s just perfect.” I sighed before the nausea rolled back through me.

The girl shivered violently again and then scrambled back from my body with a squeal. By the time the urge to vomit had passed, I looked up to find her shaking her hands out at her sides and shrieking while doing a knee lift version of jogging in place. She emitted a high-pitched keening noise, almost like a dolphin, and pointed at my body. I heard the words “soul”, “violated” and I’m not sure but I think there was a “possessed” in the mix as well. It was hard to focus on the words with her ear-piercing pitch. The crowd just stared at her, my and my body’s fight for survival completely forgotten.

A guy in his late twenties walked up beside me. “What’s wrong with her?” he asked, his mouth turned down at the corners as he looked at the girl.

I spared him a glance. He was tall, slim and athletic. His blond hair was short on the back and sides but a little longer on top. He wore a slim-fit black suit with a narrow black tie. Not bad looking but not really my type.

“Karma,” I said with a smile.

“Ah, I’m a big fan of her work,” he said, and we watched the still screeching girl for a moment longer. “Are you ready to go?”

“Yes,” I said. I lay down over my body so we occupied the same space, keeping my head just above the blood pool. “Whenever you’re ready. I need to wipe her cheap lipstick off my painstakingly applied Chanel foundation.”

He frowned at me. “What are you doing?”

“You’re sending me back, right? Back into my body.” I sat up and gestured to my body. “Obviously.”

“Er. No.” He glanced at my body then back to me. He opened his mouth, frowned more deeply and then closed his mouth again. After checking something over his shoulder, he turned back to me. “We’re taking a time out. A day trip, if you will.”

“Why do I need a time out?”

“Your body’s trying to heal. If you jump back in now, you’ll be in agony and you won’t be able to jump back out. Give the doctors chance to pump your body full of drugs and pop back in then.”

“Sooooooo, you’re, like, an angel?” I looked him over again. He certainly had the innocent face.

He threw his head back and laughed. It was such a carefree sound, like tinkling bells and wind chimes, it brought a smile to my face. Definitely an angel.

“Can I choose where we go?” I asked as I took his hand and he pulled me out of my body, so to speak.

“Sure. Come on.” He jerked his head in the direction of an old-fashioned, red tourist bus parked in the middle of the road behind us, blocking the street. It was the kind with the swirly staircase at the back that led to the open-air top deck. It would’ve been lovely to take a ride on such a beautiful day but the sunshine seemed to shy away from it.

I waved my hand at the bus and stepped back. “I’m not really a public transport kind of girl, but thanks. And, y’know …” I gestured to the bus my body lay in front of.

“I thought we were taking a day trip?” he asked, matching me step for step as I backed up.

“Well, now, you’re suddenly a little clingy. That’s not an attractive trait in a man, and I’m an engaged woman.” I held up my hand so he could see my ring. He didn’t need to know that I’d just found the scumbag who gave it to me in bed with another woman. Or that I was technically not engaged anymore.

“We’re just on a schedule, that’s all.” He held up his hands and stopped matching my steps. “You’re not the only one coming on this day trip.”

“Wait, we have to take other people?” I grimaced in disgust.

He laughed again, just a light tinkle this time, and nodded. “I know, it sucks, right? But they’ll be in pain too if they try to climb back inside their bodies, so …” He jerked his head in the direction of the bus again.

I eyed the bus and then him. Something funny was going on here. I’d heard of people seeing white tunnels of light or floating above their bodies in this type of near-death experience; I’d not heard of people taking day trips on a tourist bus. Unless they were memory wiped after and force-fed the white light rubbish. What if he memory wiped me and I couldn’t remember who I was? Or why I hated my ex-fiancé? Or that carbs were bad?

“Y’know what?” I said as I backed up. “I think I’m good on my own. I’ll just give it a few hours and then hop back into my body. Thanks for the heads up though.”

He narrowed his eyes at me. “Where are you going?”

“I’m off to get ice cream.” I figured since I wasn’t actually in my body, if I ate anything fattening I wouldn’t pay the calorie price. At least I hoped I wouldn’t.

“I can’t let you do that,” he called after me.

“I can’t let you stop me.” I held my hands out wide and shrugged, but when I turned to walk away he was already in front of me. I checked back over my shoulder to where he’d been standing. “How did you do that?”

He narrowed his eyes at me. “You can’t haunt people.”

“Of course not. I’m not dead. But if I were, there are so many people I would haunt. My boss, for example, who just fired me because I had to slap some sanity back into a MOB. Or my fiancé, who I just found in bed with some trollop from his work, but” – I shrugged – “I’m an excellent grudge keeper, so they can wait until I die. I should have a much longer list by then.”

He looked me over. “You’re a little slight to take on a mob, especially by slapping. Didn’t you have a pitchfork to hand? Everyone needs a pitchfork when tackling a mob. Was it emergency measures?”

I frowned at him. “A pitchfork? What would I— No. Not a mob. A MOB. Mother of the bride. I’m an event planner.”

“Don’t people plan their own weddings anymore?”

“Not as well as I do. Anyway, that can all wait since” – I jerked my thumb over my shoulder and raised my voice so he could hear me over the approaching sirens – “I kinda just got hit by a bus, so I feel today should be about ice cream. Then again, I think most days should be about ice cream.”

He nodded. “I feel the same about pastries so I’m sorry to do this to you.”

Before I could even ask what he was sorry for, he had his hand on my shoulder and we were inside the sunlight-repellent tourist bus. The first thing I noticed was it was even gloomier inside than it had appeared from the street, and I hadn’t thought that was possible. The second was that the bus reeked of the sugary sweet smell of a bakery – guess he hadn’t been kidding about the pastries. The third, and most horrific, thing was that the bus was not only full, it was full of crying people.

“No.” I knocked his hand off my shoulder. “Day trip or not, I refuse to be confined with these people.”

“Imagine how I feel.” He grinned at me and moved back behind the wheel.

He didn’t give me chance to find a seat or even something to hold onto. He revved the engine and we were off. I managed to grab hold of one of the rails in time before I went flying down the passageway. I monkeybarred along the aisle and to the front.

“You’re not meant to be up here. It can distract the driver.” Still grinning, eyes on me, he spun the wheel to the right.

I didn’t scream but that was only because if I opened my mouth I was going to vomit. I was not a good traveller on the best of days. When the bus straightened out and I could breathe again without fear of seeing my breakfast, I tapped the driver on the shoulder.

“I’ve told you, you’re not meant to be up here. You could distract me.” He was still grinning as he jerked the wheel from left to right in such abrupt motions there was a moment I thought the bus was going to tip. I assumed he felt it too because he stopped playing.

“You’re an idiot,” I said as I braced myself as best I could against the pole I was holding on to, and then reached down to engage the handbrake. The driver slammed on the brakes to aid the handbrake and the bus came to a screeching halt.

He leaped out of his seat to face me, fury sparking in his dark eyes. “Do not ever mess with my bus. Now sit down.” He pointed to the back of the bus. “Go.”

I folded my arms and stared back at him. “No.”

“Sit down.” He didn’t growl exactly, but the menace in his tone came through loud and clear. And then his face changed. Or it didn’t change exactly, more like a shadow hovered over it. A shadow with reptilian eyes and short porcupine spines for a beard. I leaned in closer to get a better look. Obviously, bleeding out in the street had made me mad. Or hallucinate. Or just something. Maybe his soul was out of sync with his body somehow, being an angel. I was so trying that porcupine beard thing when I got back into my body – I would never need to slap a MOB again.

I pointed to his jaw area. “Y’know, beard oil might help with that.”

The reptilian eyes blinked at me then faded, leaving mildly confused human ones. “What’s your name?”

I held out my hand. “I’m Bridget. Who are you?” I liked him. He was rude and, I had the impression, not a people person.

“I’m Charon.” He looked at my hand as if he expected me to retract it. I didn’t. He frowned. “The ferryman of the dead.”

“Yeah, I know who you are, but my Greek mythology is a little rusty. Who is your mum?”

His frown intensified. “Why?”

“Because you’ve left me standing here with my hand outstretched.” I waggled it for emphasis. “So either you’re impolite or your mother didn’t teach you any manners. Whichever, I think she and I need to have a conversation.”

His frown morphed into a huge grin and he slapped his hand into mine, shaking it more vigorously than I thought necessary. “It’s a pleasure to meet you, Bridget.”

“I’d say the same but that kind of depends whether you lied to me about our day trip.” I threw a pointed glance over my shoulder at the sobbing passengers. “I get the sense you may have stretched the truth.”

“Maybe a little,” he said and climbed back into his driving seat.

“How much is ‘a little’? You’re just filling in for … Is there a Greek person who looks after the temporarily displaced people?”

“People? You mean souls?”

“No. I mean people.” I point-blank refused to think of myself as a soul. It was just far too weird. The sooner I was back in my body and this hallucination was over, the better. I’d decided it was a hallucination since the ancient Greek ferryman of the dead was driving a tourist bus around central London in a well-cut black suit. Realistically, what else could it be?

Charon shook his head. “We don’t have a nanny for temporarily displaced souls. That’s why your soul is here with me.”

“You have a nanny for permanently displaced souls?”

Charon gave me a flat stare. “Yes. We call him Hades.”

“Well, I walked right into that one,” I mumbled. All this talk of souls and Hades was just so very not how I’d expected my day to go.

“But that’s not where I’m going, right?” I asked. “Because I’m not dead.”

Charon shook his head, a small smile pulling at the corners of his mouth. “You’re not going to meet Hades, no.”

“Because I’m not dead,” I stressed the point.

“As long as your heart’s beating, it’ll be fine.” He shrugged.

I narrowed my eyes at him. “I have your word on that?”

“As long as your body’s still alive, you’ll be able to climb back into it.” He crossed his heart and held up his hand.

“Like Odysseus, right? You ferried him to the underworld and he still came back to the world of the living.”

Charon rubbed his chin and laughed. “There’s a name I’ve not heard in an age. Let me tell you, the real story is nothing like the one you’ve heard. Damn media, always manipulating the facts.”

“Homer was a reporter?”

“Of sorts. Not in the way you’d understand it, but yeah.”

“How about you put your foot down and get us to the beach? You can tell me all about it as we paddle in the sea and eat ice cream in the sunshine.”

Charon paused as if he was considering it and then shook his head. “We have a few more people to pick up so that wouldn’t be very responsible of me.”

“I was a responsible adult today and went to work when I wanted to go to the beach. Look how that turned out.”

Charon laughed. It was such a carefree sound it felt out of place in such a grim environment. “I’ll meet you halfway.”

“Halfway to the beach is still not at the beach,” I said, but he’d done that disappearing thing again before I’d finished.

He reappeared in front of me with a healthy-sized tub of whipped ice cream covered in chocolate sprinkles, chopped nuts and raspberry sauce with a small yellow spoon sticking out of it. He handed it to me.

“Halfway point?” he asked.

I took it from him and clutched it close to my heart. “Final destination. I was only going to the beach for the ice cream.” I dug out the spoon and ate a mouthful.

“If you were only going for that then why wouldn’t you just get ice cream from near where you live?” he asked as he climbed back behind the wheel.

“Everyone knows that ice cream consumed at the beach has no calories, but ice cream consumed on the sofa has twice as many.”

He shook his head. “Women are so weird.”

“Thank you for my ice cream,” I said, moving down the bus to find a seat. I wanted to be secure before he took off again and both my ice cream and I went flying.

“Hey.” Charon called and pointed to the small baggage storage shelf. “You can sit there and talk to me.”

“Thought I wasn’t supposed to distract you?”

Charon’s attention flicked over my shoulder. “Do you really want to sit down there with them?”

I glanced behind me at the crying passengers. “No, they might make my ice cream curdle.”

He pointed to the baggage shelf again, waited until I was seated then took off at breakneck speed.

“So are we just going to tour London while we wait for the drugs in my body to kick in?”

He fixed his eyes on the road ahead. “Something like that.”

“It’s not the same for them, right?” I pointed at the other passengers with my spoon. From my perspective, being temporarily separated from your body was like a vacation from yourself. Crying about it seemed a little whiney to me.

“No, they’re dead.” Charon didn’t check over his shoulder; he continued to stare at the road ahead.

“And you’re absolutely sure I’m not dead?” I asked, scooping up some more ice cream. “Because I don’t feel dead.”

Charon threw a glance my way. “What does being dead feel like?”

I shrugged. “When I die, I’ll let you know. You’ll pick me up, right? I bet you don’t remember me.”

Charon grinned at me. “I’ll definitely remember you.”

I nodded in agreement. “Yeah, you will. I’m awesome like that.”

∞

Some time later all forty-three of the passengers and I were sitting at desks in a windowless room staring at the sunshine-yellow walls. The desks made the shape of a double horseshoe, inner and outer half circles. Our backs were to the door. We were awaiting the return of someone, anyone, to tell us what was going on.

When the bus had been full to bursting with crying people, Charon had driven us to an underground car park and shooed us towards a short, dark-haired man in his fifties slapping his hand on a clipboard and calling us all to him. The man’s beige chinos, blue polo shirt and disturbingly wide smile gave the impression of a holiday rep. Obviously when I saw that, I stepped back onto the bus.

Despite peppering Charon with my extremely long list of questions, he told me nothing. Only that I had to go to a “holding zone” and not to worry too much about what they said there, just to fill out the forms they gave me and to keep my head down until I got to the end of the process. Then I could ask my questions. Like, for example, how any of this was going to help me get back to my body.

The holiday rep had guided us across the car park, through a set of grass-green double doors into a mint-green stairwell, up three flights of stairs and along several different beige corridors before we finally reached the yellow room. Then he’d given us several forms to fill out, each stacked a centimetre thick, and said he’d be back when we were finished. I didn’t know how he’d know when we were finished, because he hadn’t checked on us since. And that was nearly fourteen hours ago, according to the clock on the wall. Though if I’d just given a group of people an inch and a half of paperwork, I’d probably be making myself scarce too.

“Are we all done?” The perky holiday rep bounded in and all the way to the front of the two horseshoes of desks.

“Yes. We were done over four hours ago.” I didn’t even try to keep the irritation out of my tone. I needed to get back to my body. What if some random homeless-soul-person jumped in it? I mean, I didn’t doubt Charon was very good at his job, but surely he missed a dead-soul-person every now and again. Human error and all. And I was hot. Not even getting hit by a bus had changed that. What if an old woman – or worse, old man – jumped inside me? How would I get them out?

The rep clapped his hand against his clipboard and pointed to me. “Fab. You should have had plenty of time to check you’d filled everything out correctly.”

“Yes. We were done with that three hours ago,” I said.

“Fab. I expect these to be perfect then.” He winked at me, that disturbingly wide smile still in place. He just wasn’t getting my digs and that only annoyed me more. “Right. Everyone on their feet, and bring your forms over here, please.” He moved to the left and pulled down a metal door to a chute.

I knew it was a chute because directly after he’d left the room I’d checked for a way out. He’d locked us in, so the only other option was the metal door to the chute. I’d seriously considered it, except I couldn’t see what was at the end of it. Frying pan versus the fire, and all. I know Charon had said to go with the process, but right now I couldn’t see how filling out forms about my childhood memories or giving detailed accounts of my most memorable experiences for each year of my life was going to help me get back to my body. Maybe it was just to keep us occupied while our bodies had time to fully metabolise the pain drugs. I looked around the room. But hadn’t he said all these people were all dead? What was the point in them killing time?

Everyone lined up and slid their forms down the metal chute. When it was my turn, I peered down it. I still couldn’t see where it went.

“Do you have anything I could bind them together with?” I asked.

He waved his hand. “Don’t worry about that. Just throw them in.”

“I do worry about that. The forms will separate as they slide down and probably get mixed up with everyone else’s at the bottom.”

He waved his hand again. “Don’t worry about that. Just throw them in.”

I narrowed my eyes at him. “Where does this chute go?”

He shrugged, still smiling. “Don’t know. Now just throw them in.”

“How do you not know where this chute goes?”

“That’s not my department.”

“What’s not your department?”

“The bottom of the chute.”

“What’s your department?”

“The top of the chute.”

I stared at him. “What is the purpose of these forms?”

“That’s not my department.”

“But you asked us to fill them out. You gave them to us.” It was all I could do to not jab my finger into his chest.

“Yes, handing them out is my department. The rationale behind it isn’t though.”

I stared at him. If I was still somehow linked to my body, which I was assuming I had to be, then maybe this was all a very vivid coma dream and whatever medication they were pumping me full of was simply not agreeing with me. Yes. That had to be it. This was an incredibly real coma dream. What else would explain Charon, the ferryman of death, not only being real but driving a tourist bus? Maybe he was a manifestation of my subconscious just telling me to ride out this dodgy batch of morphine and wait for the good stuff to kick in.

Still, all that form filling had felt unpleasantly real. I glanced around the room at the zombies who were just tossing away ten hours of form filling down a chute to who knew where. Morphine dream or not, I couldn’t just let that go.

“Does no one have a problem with this but me?”

A long silence.

“Guess not,” said the holiday rep. He grabbed my forms and tossed them down the chute, not even trying to keep them together. I stared after them in horror. “Next?” he called, politely waiting for me to move.

I returned to my seat and watched as everyone else simply tossed their forms into the chute. No questions. No complaints. It was weirdly like watching some sort of bureaucratic sacrifice. When it was done, the holiday rep closed the chute and clapped against his clipboard.

“Fab. Don’t you all feel better now?” No one responded. “Fab. My name is Sean and I’ll be your Afterlife Induction Officer—”

“Hold up.” I held my hand as if to physically stop him continuing. “You’re a what?”

He grinned and wagged his finger at me. “Shush.”

I stared at him. “Did you just shush me?”

“Shush.” He wagged his finger at me again, still grinning.

I opened my mouth but nothing came out. What did you say when another adult “shushed” you? I glanced around the room to gauge everyone else’s reaction to this. The main expression on show was despondence. There were a few distraughts that were still choking back their tears, but ultimately no one looked to be in the questioning mood.

Okay, so Charon, or my subconscious-self, had told me to get through the process and then everything would be okay. I closed my mouth with a click. The fewer questions I asked, the quicker I’d be through this and back with my body. Then I could put this ridiculous nightmare behind me and get a facial. That thought stopped me cold. A facial. My face had been undamaged, but I must have cut the back of my head when I landed. What if they shaved my head to stitch it up? They’d just work around my hair, surely? A cold shiver trickled down my spine. They were shaving part of my hair off right at that moment. I knew it. I knew they were. I looked terrible with short hair. Maybe it would just be a small patch I could cover. I felt the back of my head. All my hair was there. But then, I didn’t have any cuts on me either, so who knew what those careless doctors were doing to my beautiful hair at this precise moment.

“Right.” Sean clapped his hand against the clipboard again. “Let’s get to the fun stuff. Now, I don’t know if this will come as a shock to you buuuuuuut …” – he stretched the word out and bent forward as he looked around the room – “… you’re all dead. Yaaaaay.” He waved his hands above his head, still holding the clipboard, and did what I can only assume he thought was a happy dance at this revelation. “Isn’t that just fab?”

“Er, yeah, some of us aren’t. Some of us still have bodies to get back to, so do you think you could hurry this along?” I know Charon, or my subconscious, had said to keep my head down, but this guy was annoying the little life I had left out of me.

Sean stared at me blankly for a long moment then burst out laughing. It sounded like a choking dog. “I can see I’m going to have to watch you.”

Huh. Okay. Time to keep my mouth shut then. I rested my elbow on the desk and supported my head on my hand, slouching in temporary defeat.

“There are so many important things we need to get through to turn you dead slugs into dead butterflies—”

“Caterpillars,” I corrected without evening meaning to. I wasn’t touching the whole dead issue. I just didn’t have the energy.

Sean leaned forwards again and cooed at me as if he were talking to a baby. “What was that, you little mumbler?”

I didn’t even bother raising my head from my hand. “Caterpillars turn into butterflies. Slugs are always slugs.”

“Well, alright then, Little Miss Smarty-pants.” There was no malice or attitude in his voice. “We need to turn you dead caterpillars into dead butterflies before we can release you into the wild. To kick off—”

“What exactly is ‘the wild’? Is that, like, the real world?” I glanced around again to see if anyone else was relieved by that, but no one else appeared to be mentally present in the room, and I was including Sean in that. And I had no idea why I expected him to have answers. Induction leaders never had answers in life, so why would that be any different in death? Or temporary out of body experiences. Or drug induced coma dreams. Or whatever it was I was having.

“Aren’t you just full of questions?”

I gave him a flat stare. “Yes.”

“How about you keep them until question time?” he asked, still smiling, still happy. There was something very wrong with him. He walked around the outer horseshoe, handed me a pencil and unclipped a sheet of paper. He looked me over, frowned, then unclipped two more sheets and handed those to me as well. “Write them all down, and that way you won’t forget anything.”

I accepted the paper with a thank you and the manners my mother had taught me, and he walked back to the front of the class.

“So, to kick off, does anyone have any questions?”

I looked up from my sheets of paper to see his expectant expression as he gazed from despondent face to apathetic face to downright zombie face.

I sat up in my chair. “I have a question, but I thought you said it wasn’t question time yet.”

“It wasn’t when you interrupted, but it is now.”

I frowned at him. “So, because I asked you a question before you asked if we had any questions, you wanted me to write it down so I wouldn’t forget it while you walked back to the front to ask if we had any questions?” I must have this wrong. I’d either zoned out and missed a chunk of time, or it was a really bad batch of morphine the doctors were pumping into my body.

“That’s right. Was that your question?”

I lifted my hands up in a helpless gesture and looked around the room. Was anyone else hearing this? Maybe the rest of them were all non-compos mentis because they were all dead. “You know that wasn’t my question.”

He grimaced but somehow still managed to keep his smile in place. “I don’t know. That sounded like a question to me.”

I stared at him. “Are you serious right now?”

He clapped his hand against the clipboard and pointed to me. “Whoop! There’s another one.” He held up his hands and made a patting motion as if he was trying to calm the distinctly disinterested room down. “And I should have said earlier, my little chickens, you only get one question per question section.”

“Then why did you give me so much paper?” I waved it at him.

He pointed to the paper in my hand and stage whispered, “How about you write that down and keep it for the next question section?”

“How about you just answer my initial question?”

He pointed to the paper again, still smiling. “And keep that one for the time after. Now …”

I turned to the vacant-looking lady to my right while Sean flipped through the sheets on his clipboard. “Excuse me, do you mind if I have your question?”

She turned to me, her eyes focused on mine but her gaze vacant. “I was just in the supermarket. I had fish fingers in the trolley. They’ll have defrosted by now.”

Uh-huh.

I turned back to Sean and waved at him to get his attention. “Excuse me? Hi? This lady said I could have her question.”

Sean stared at me, eyes wide in horror. “You can’t do that. You can’t talk to each other,” he hissed, checking over both shoulders as if he expected someone to appear behind him.

“What? Why not?” This was so far past ridiculous it was, well, ridiculous.

“You just can’t.” He leaned forward, still holding the clipboard but with his hands extended to me palms up, sort of flapping them up and down.

I reclined in my chair and folded my arms. “Well, I guess you should’ve told us that before you locked us in here half a day ago, because we’ve been having a great chinwag.” We hadn’t. No one had spoken. I was just baiting him because I was a bad person and he was annoying me.

Sean gasped and covered his mouth with his hand. Then he covered his mouth and his hand with the clipboard for a double whammy. Then he fainted. No one else in the room even noticed.

I stared at the empty space. “Well, that’s just great.” I stood up and turned to the door behind me and tried the handle. It was locked. I banged on it. “Hey? Hello? Someone’s fainted in here. Can we have some help, please?” Nothing. “Or maybe just some sort of acknowledgement someone is out there?” Nothing. “How about one tap for ‘hello’ and two taps for ‘you have pretty eyes’?” Nothing.

Turning back to the room, I blew out a breath and adjusted my already perfect fringe. I walked around the side of the outer horseshoe to the front and looked down at Sean. I wasn’t all that good with sick people, or whiny people, or happy people. Actually, considering I was an event planner, which meant dealing with people all day every day, I wasn’t all that good with people in general. That’s how I came to slap the hysterical MOB and be fired.

“Hey, does anyone know what to do?” I asked the room as I knelt down over him. I hadn’t really paid all that much attention at that first aid course I’d attended.

“About what?” a male voice asked.

I scanned the room to see who’d spoken, but no one was looking at me. Since they’d not even realised there was an unconscious man on the floor, banking on them for help was probably not the smartest idea. I leaned over Sean to check he was still breathing and had a flashback of the terrible CPR the girl had attempted on me and then her screeching. The thought made me smile. That was the moment Sean chose to wake up.

“What are you doing?” he shrieked. “Why are you hovering over my unconscious body grinning like that?”

“I’m sorry. This isn’t the question part of our session.” I pointed to his clipboard. “How about you write them down so you don’t forget?”

He scrambled back from me and pushed to his feet, using the wall for balance.

“If you could return to your seat now.” Sean attempted a smile, but it wasn’t anything like the same as before his fainting spell. He waited until I returned to my seat. “To continue. You all will be assigned roles in your new lives. Okay. And that concludes your induction. Yay. Well done, everyone.” He clapped his hand on his clipboard, giving us a shaky round of applause. “Everyone up, and let me take you to processing.”

“Whoa, whoa.” I waved my hand at him. “That’s not an induction. That was two sentences: ‘you’re dead’ and ‘you’ll be assigned a role’. What does that even mean? What role? Who’s going to assign it?” I purposely closed my mouth and shook my head to clear it of questions that were irrelevant to my current situation and focused on things I needed to know. I just hated not having all the information. “What happens if you’re not dead? I don’t want to get overlooked and stuck here. I have a party on Saturday. I’ve just bought a new dress.”

“Your induction is over, so no more questions,” Sean said in a sing-song voice, stretching his arms out to the sides and flapping them forwards to herd everyone towards the door. “Come on, everybody. On your feet.”

The others slowly got to their feet and shuffled towards the door, with me caught up in the movement. Sean danced between the zombies, yanked open the door and almost skipped out into the corridor. He’d bounced back from his fainting spell quickly.

I examined the door handle as I passed. There was no lock, no swipe card access, just a door handle on either side. So how had we been locked in? Because we’d definitely been locked in, and how did Sean open it?

We followed Sean along the corridor to a set of white double doors where a lady in the same beige chinos and blue polo shirt was ticking something off her matching blue clipboard. She’d tied her short, dark-blonde hair into a stubby ponytail, if you could call it that, and littered her hair with kirby grips to keep it off her face.

She glanced up from her clipboard when Sean called to her. On seeing our zombie horde approach, she lifted her arms above her head and waved them in the air at us, much like Sean had earlier.

“Yay! More dead people.” She clapped on her clipboard like Sean.

This was going to get really old really fast. Why didn’t they have a separate area for temporaries like me?

Sean gestured to kirby grip girl. “This is Delilah. She’ll be your guide for the next part of your journey. It was a pleasure inducting you guys. I know you’ll have a great time being dead.”

“Yay!” Delilah cheered. “Being dead is super fun. Thank you, Sean. Follow me, everyone.”

Delilah pushed open the double doors and walked through. Even from the back of the zombie horde I could hear the cacophony of chatter awaiting us on the other side. At least they sounded livelier than my current companions. Sean waved at us all as we trickled through. When I passed him he grabbed my arm, smile still fixed in place.

“Please, please don’t tell anyone about the talking. Please. Promise you won’t?” Despite the smile, panic edged his voice. When I delayed in responding, he shook my arm. “Promise me. I don’t want to go to GB jail. Please?”

I frowned at him. “What the hell is jeebie jail?”

“Not jeebie jail, GB jail.” His eyes darted around us as he spoke.

“What’s GB jail?”

He shook my arm again. “Promise me!”

I yanked my arm from his grasp. “Yes, yes, I promise.”

“Don’t talk to anyone else. And stop telling people you’re not dead. Do you understand?”

“Why?”

“Just don’t.” He stepped back, his smile widening as he clapped his clipboard and pointed to me. “You have a great time being dead, you hear?” He didn’t wait for a response, just jogged back along the corridor.

I frowned after him. “This is so not how I expected my day to go.”

“There you are, lollygagging behind. Come on.” Delilah linked her arm with mine and pulled me through the doors. I removed her hand from me. Why did everyone keep touching me? Death, temporary or otherwise, did not eradicate the need for personal space.

We emerged onto a small balcony overlooking eight incredibly long lines of people queueing patiently for their turn at the booth. It reminded me of passport control. Only there was no luggage, no crying children and a lot less shoving. I found that creepier to watch than if it had been chaos. Chaos I could have understood. People rallying against the injustice of dying I could have gotten behind. People shoving to get to the front in a hurry to get back to their bodies seemed reasonable. People waiting patiently to have their dead, or temporarily out-of-body, passport stamped? No. Or maybe they’d just had an induction that was more than two sentences long so they knew what was happening. I wondered which was the temporary line. Probably the longest, knowing my luck.

The chatter bounced off the hall’s high ceiling and windowless walls. Despite the lack of stained glass, the acoustics and exposed brickwork reminded me of a church. After the passport booths, the width of the hall quickly narrowed into a corridor barely wide enough for two people to walk abreast and ended in another set of white double doors.

“Now, everyone.” Delilah clapped on her damn clipboard. “Please follow me down these stairs as we head to what we affectionately call ‘the sorting room’.”

Delilah descended first, waited at the bottom of the stairs for our sludge of people to follow and ushered us through the door straight ahead. The room was an exact replica of the one we’d just left except it was empty of desks and instead of having a pull-down door on the metal chute it had a pull-up flap, beneath which was a large canvas bin. I had a horrible, horrible feeling I knew where this was going.

“Remember those forms you filled out?” Delilah moved to the centre of the room so she could see us all. “Now it’s time to collect them and take them to processing. Yay!” She waved her arms in the air again as if this was such an amazing feat. When no one moved, she shepherded everyone towards the bin.

I let the zombies go ahead and waited for her to walk back to me. “Are you telling me that we slid our forms down that chute only to collect them now?” That better not have been what happened.

“Oh, I’m sorry.” Delilah clasped her hand and clipboard over her heart with a genuine expression of mild distress. “The top of the chute isn’t my department. I have no idea what goes on up there.”

I stared at her. Had nearly dying made me extra irritable or were these people just super annoying? I blew out a breath and adjusted my fringe. Again. “Okay. Do you know where these forms come from?”

She nodded, obviously happy she could answer that question. “The chute.”

“Okaaaaaay, so what happens in between us sliding them into the chute and them coming out? They get stamped or checked or somethinged, right?”

“Oh, I’m sorry.” Delilah shook her head. “That’s—”

“Not your department?”

She clapped her hand on her clipboard and pointed to me. “Exactly. Gosh, you pick things up quickly, don’t you?” she said with no hint of sarcasm whatsoever.

“Be nice, Bridget. Just be nice,” I muttered to myself.

Delilah winced apologetically and placed her hand on my arm. “I’m sorry. Didn’t you hear me introduce myself? My name’s Delilah, and I’m always nice.”

I moved her hand from my arm, sighed and gestured to the bin. “I’m going to get my forms now.”

Delilah clapped on her clipboard and pointed to me. “That’s it. PMA. Positive mental attitude. All the way.”

“I’ll PMA you all the way in a minute,” I muttered, standing at the back of the horde.

When it was finally my turn I bent over the rim of the bin to collect the mess of paper that was my forms.

“Follow me, please, everyone.” Delilah headed out of the room and towards the queues.

We waited while Delilah split us up evenly across the lines. I glanced around at my section of the group. They looked as zoned out as everyone else. Everyone except me moved to their allotted lines.

“Did you forget which was your line?” Delilah asked when she saw I was still standing by her.

“No, actually I was wondering which one of these lines was the temporarily-separated-from-your-body line.” I made a sweeping gestured to encompass all the equally long, equally slow moving queues.

Delilah blinked at me nonplussed. Her face was completely devoid of any expression for at least ten seconds, and then she giggled and placed her hand on my arm. “Oh, you’re a hoot. You’ll have such a great time being dead.” She leaned closer, still smiling, as her eyes darted to the front on the queues. “Maybe keep the jokes to yourself until you’re all the way through, though, okay?”

Her hand on my back, she ushered me to the queue she’d assigned to me and placed me in front of my zombie group mates, casting another furtive glance to the front of the hall.

“I wasn’t kidding. I need to get—”

“Shush.” Delilah placed her finger on her lips and backed away so she could see the end of all of the queues and called our attention back to her.

“One last thing, guys. It’s been my genuine pleasure to guide you down the stairs and both in and out of the sorting room. Enjoy queuing, and I know you’ll all have a great time being dead.” Delilah waved, turned her back on us and headed up the stairs again.

The middle-aged man in front of me in paint splattered, navy overalls scowled at Delilah’s back. “If one more person tells me they know I’ll have a great time being dead, I’m going to turn violent.” He cracked his neck as if to emphasise the point. “I mean, really violent. You know?”

I nodded. “Yeah, I know.” I wasn’t exactly sure it would drive me to physical violence, but the next person that clapped on their clipboard and pointed to me was going to get a rather stern talking to about how to deal with people. Never mind the next person to shush me.

The man extended his hand to me. “I’m Mike.”

I shook it. “Bridget. I’m guessing since you can hold a conversation you’re not dead either?”

“Nope. I’m dead. Broken neck,” he said, cracking his neck again as if it were somehow out of joint and he was trying to rectify it.

“This isn’t the temporary line?” I stood on tiptoes, scanning the room for the liveliest queue. I’d been very much hoping that maybe Delilah and Sean were extremely inept, instead of just moderately inept, and that the temporary queue just wasn’t their department.

“I don’t think there is a temporary line.”

“So where do people like me go?”

He took a step back and looked me over. “Aren’t you dead?”

“Nope, just having a day trip from my body while the doctors pump me full of drugs. Or a coma dream. Or a really vivid nightmare. If you’re dead like everyone else, how are you talking to me like a mostly rational person?”

“No clue.” He shrugged. “How are you having a day trip away from your body?”

I shrugged back. “No clue. But I’d kinda like to get back to it. Preferably before the doctors shave off all my hair or pull the plug on me because I’m not waking up. So, do you know what happens here so I can maybe whizz on through?” I pointed to the booths that were so far away they reminded me of the houses in Monopoly. Maybe the temps just went through with the regular dead folks and they separated us later. Unless they got a move on, that wasn’t going to work for me.

He shook his head. “I’ve no idea. I think they do something with your forms and then let you pass through.”

“Have you only just died?” He was taking it pretty well.

“No, it was a couple of days ago now, I think.”

“You don’t know how long you’ve been here?”

“There’s no windows, no clock. How would I know?”

“Well, the only people behind you are from my group, so it can’t have been that long.”

He laughed but there was no humour in it. “They close a booth every few hours when someone’s shift finishes and then that queue is divided up and sent to the back of the other queues.”

“What happens when they reopen it?”

“They take a percentage of the people at the front of every queue and send them to that booth.”

I thought about that for a moment. “So, you could be at the front of one queue and then they send you to the back of another queue?”

He nodded. “Yep.”

Suddenly his threat of violence didn’t seem so unreasonable. I wasn’t sure how I’d feel after days of queueing. I couldn’t stay here for days though, so surely there must have been an express system for people like me. Surely.

I looked around for any of those idiot clipboard-clapping reps pulling people out of line like they did at airports for the VIP check in. I could hear lots of chatter but most of the people I could see weren’t talking. In fact, Mike and I were the only ones.

“It’s a tape,” he said, swirling his finger in the air to gesture around the room.

“What is?”

“The noise. The chatter. You were looking for who was speaking, right? And couldn’t see anyone.” I nodded and he swirled his finger in the air again. “It’s a tape. Every now and then it jumps and someone—”

As if on cue, the tape jumped. The chatter sped up to the point where it sounded like hyperactive birds cheeping and then just cut out. The silence that followed it was deafening. There was nothing. No muttering. No shuffling. No coughing. No sniffing. No basic hum of human noise. Nothing. The air was thick with a dead silence. There was no other way to describe it but dead. I’d never heard anything like it before.

The tape kicked back in and the chatter resumed.

Mike raised an eyebrow at me. “Creepy, right?”

I nodded, eyes wide. “Yeah. Does every dead person have to pass through here?”

“I think so, judging by the mix of ethnicity, but” – Mike shrugged – “they might be holograms and this might be hell.”

“I imagined a lot more fire and brimstone in hell.”

“Wait until you’ve been queuing for a few days, reached the front three times and then got sent to the back of another queue. Then talk to me about hell.”

I stepped back and eyed Mike. That sounded a lot like another Greek guy who’d been damned to eternally push a boulder up a hill only to have it roll down again. Pretty sure his name hadn’t been Mike, though. So either my coma brain was creating a dream populated with Greek legends, or the afterlife hadn’t changed all that much since ancient Greece. Wasn’t that an odd thought? It definitely had to be a coma dream. Maybe getting through this process was my mind’s way of fighting back to consciousness. No, that couldn’t be right. My brain knew me better than that. If it had wanted me to get through this process quicker, it would’ve incentivised me with the promise of a free pair of Jimmy Choos to the first person through. If that’d been the case, I’d be awake by now.

I leaned out of the queue to peer along the line of people and at the booths. “Who are they?” I asked, nodding to the men in black jumpsuits and black burglar masks. One stood by the side of each booth. I wasn’t a fan of masks. To me it negated personal responsibility for your actions.

Mike shook his head. “No idea. I’ve not seen them move except for shift changes. They reminded me of the beefeaters at Buckingham Palace.”

I watched them a moment longer. “Do you know why we’re not allowed to talk to each other?”

“Apparently it means you’ve not taken to dying very well.”

I arched an eyebrow at him. “The implication being the zombie horde around us have?”

“That would be the implication, yes.”

I glanced around at all the vacant faces. “I feel they’ve got that backwards.”

Mike huffed a laugh. “Didn’t I explain the queuing system to you? I feel they’ve got a lot backwards.”

“So what happens if they think you’re not taking dying well?”

“They cuff you and drag you off through those doors.” Mike pointed to the side of the room at a set of black double doors. They stood out like a shadow on the wall.

“They look pretty ominous,” I said before peering out of the queue towards the front again. “Wait, I thought you said you hadn’t seen them move?”

“I haven’t. Other than shift changes and arresting people,” he corrected.

I stared at him. “I’m pretty sure you should’ve mentioned that. And how do you know they’re being arrested?”

“Why else would they handcuff you?”

I opened my mouth to give him some options but I couldn’t think of any. I considered a couple of situations that might require furry handcuffs, but none that involved getting dragged through a set of doors to who knew where.

“So why did you take dying so well?” I asked.

“I think I’ve taken to dying pretty well, myself. Just sort of took it in my stride. Apparently, according to the black jumpsuits, that means I’m ‘emotionally maladjusted’.”

I frowned. “That doesn’t really make sense.”

“What about this place does? Did you have to toss those forms down the chute?” Mike asked, pointing to the paperwork in my hands with his own wad.

“Do you know what happens in that chute?”

“Nothing happens in that chute. You throw them down for health and safety reasons.”

“What health and safety reasons?”

“It’s in case you were to injure your back or knees with the extra weight walking down the stairs.”

“I’m sorry?”

“They make you do it so you don’t have to carry the extra weight down the stairs and possibly cause an injury.”

I opened my mouth to speak and closed it again, gasping like a fish for some sort of response. I had nothing.

“That was my response too when I found out. I’m surprised they don’t make us wear gardening gloves while handling the forms to protect us from paper cuts.”

“How do you know all this?”

“I’ve been queueing here for a long time.”

I rubbed my forehead with the back of my hand. I could not queue for a long time. I got palpitations if I had to do it for longer than five minutes in the real world, and that was usually when I was just food shopping. I couldn’t do it here when I had my body to get back to.

“That doesn’t make the queue move any quicker,” Mike said, watching me peer out of the line again.

“We’ve got incoming,” I mumbled as I pulled my head back in and stared straight ahead.

“What do you mean?” Mike moved as if he was going to stick his head out of the line to look but I stopped him.

“Y’know those beefeaters who never move except to change shifts and arrest people? Well, one’s coming this way.” I stared straight ahead and aimed for my most vacant expression. Mike cursed and did the same.

The black jumpsuit came to a stop next to me. I didn’t turn to look at him, but out of my peripheral vision I could tell he was tall and broad enough to deter a normal person from picking a fight. He’d slicked his short, dark hair back like the other black jumpsuits I’d seen so from a distance they were almost indistinguishable.

“Having an interesting conversation?”

What was I supposed to say to that? No, I wasn’t particularly having a good conversation because I’d just learned some quite disturbing things. Or how about, “Yes, it’s great. I love being nearly dead. Can you point me in the direction of my body, please?” Before I’d even decided which tack to go with, my mouth opened and I spoke on autopilot.

“I was just in the supermarket. I had fish fingers in the trolley. They’ll have defrosted by now.”

Mr Black Jumpsuit hovered beside me for a moment longer. Long enough for me to steal a glance at him and see “GB” embroidered in white on the lower right curve of his burglar mask and the right breast of his jumpsuit. So Sean had been afraid of these guys? The GB man turned his back on us and walked back to his post.

“Where did that come from?” Mike murmured.

“Crazy woman in my group said it.”

“Nice save.”

“Do you know who they are?” I asked. “Like, are they the police or something?”

“I’ve no clue. I thought they were security. Why?”

“Because my induction leader was terrified of them.”

Mike shrugged. “No one likes the police.”

I was going to correct him and explain that when I had said “terrified” that was what I had meant, but until we knew more there seemed no point in adding extra stress to Mike’s everlasting queuing experience.

An age, and much mumbled conversation, later we were at the front of the queue. I say it was “an age” because that’s what it felt like, and I had no other way to measure the time.

The person in front of Mike stepped up to the booth. They looked like regular passport control booths. Every now and again one of GB men pointed to someone who was so out of it they didn’t realise they had made it to the front of the queue and needed a nudge, but otherwise they didn’t move or speak.

The guy in front of Mike received his forms back and was ushered on to whatever ridiculousness was next. Mike didn’t move. He stood still and stared at the booth like it was his Mecca. The GB guy pointed to Mike. That startled him awake and he stepped forward. In his hurry, Mike somehow managed to trip over his own feet. He fell face down on the floor with his forms scattered out in front of him. The GB guy looked down at him then up at me. He motioned me forward.

“No, no, he’s next.” I pointed to Mike, who looked up when I spoke. His eyes darted to the guy and then back to me. I didn’t know if it was panic, but he’d stopped collecting his forms and was just watching the conversation.

“He’s picking up his forms. You’re next.”

“No. No. No. He is definitely next. Definitely. I can wait,” I said.

“Well, I can’t,” snapped the GB man. “So, get over here. Now.”

I hesitated. I didn’t want to take Mike’s place, but then he was still sitting there watching the conversation. He could have picked up his forms while I stalled but he hadn’t. Maybe if I’d been stuck in queue after queue I’d have the same rabbit-in-the-headlights expression. But then, I had a body to get back to and he was dead. What difference did an extra queue place make to him?

I stepped forwards and pushed my forms through the little letterbox in the glass. The woman behind the glass didn’t look up; she just stamped, and stamped, and stamped.

While she was doing that I picked up Mike’s forms, neatened them and put them back in his hands. He stared at me with a completely vacant expression.

“You’re next,” I said when the empty eyes got too much for me.

He blinked and came back to life. “Right. Yeah. Thanks.”

I offered him my hand to pull him to his feet and pointed just past the booth, mouthing that I’d wait for him. I felt the eyes of the GB man on me, so I ducked my head and put my zombie please-don’t-arrest-me face back on.

“Do you have anything to declare?” the woman droned from behind the glass.

“Like what?” I asked. Was this like the airport? Was I not supposed to bring liquids through? Did I need to explain I was only on a temporary separated-from-my-body visa?

The woman almost shuddered awake at my response, as if she wasn’t used to being acknowledged. She flicked her eyes to Mr GB to her right and then back to me.

I glanced in the opposite direction to Mr GB at the next booth over. The zombie waiting for his forms back didn’t speak. He got his forms back and passed on through. I turned back to the lady and didn’t say anything else.

“Problem?” Mr GB glanced between the woman behind the glass and me.

“No.” The woman shook her head and pushed the forms back through the hole in the glass.

Mr GB reached for them before I could. “Being dead sucks, doesn’t it …” – he paused and read my name from the front of my forms – “Bridget?”

I glanced to the woman behind the glass and she shook her head almost imperceptibly. At least I though she did. I stared back at the GB man and said nothing. He stepped closer and leaned in, staring into my face for an excruciatingly long moment. Finally, he handed the forms back to me and then nudged me passed the booth. I hovered on the other side and gave Mike the thumbs up behind Mr GB’s back. And then the light in the booth went out. And then the light behind Mike’s eyes went out.

I winced in anticipation since I knew what was going to happen a few seconds before it did. Mike screamed. Not a girly there’s-a-spider scream. A pain soaked sound of total, unadulterated rage. It chilled me all the way to the bones of my distant body. Mike tossed his forms in the air like confetti and launched at the GB guy, who had him face down on the floor before he’d taken more than two strides forward. Mr GB handcuffed him and dragged him to his feet. Mike screamed obscenities at the woman in the booth, at the man who held him, at me, at the ceiling.

Then a man walked up from behind me with a light bulb in his hand. He handed it to the lady through the letterbox, and a few seconds later the light came back on. Like a moth, Mike instantly noticed the booth light back up. The expression on his face flipped from rage, to disbelief, to disillusionment and then back to rage.

“Noooooooooooooooo,” Mike screamed.

“This isn’t a circus show, Miss,” the man who’d walked past me with the light bulb said and turned me around by my shoulders. “Onwards. Always onwards.”

He escorted me along the narrowing, beige corridor towards the pair of double doors as Mike’s scream echoed behind me. “Straight through there, now, Miss. No loitering.”

“Right.” I nodded but didn’t move. “What’s going to happen to Mike?”

He frowned and looked behind me. “Who’s Mike?”

“The guy the black jumpsuit handcuffed.”

“Oh.”

I waited but nothing else was forthcoming. “What? What does that mean?”

“Straight through there, now, Miss. No loitering. Onwards. Always onwards.” He gestured to the double doors, turned away from me and disappeared through a door in the right wall of the corridor. A couple of members of the zombie horde wandered up behind me. Worrying they were likely to smell my brain still working and think it would make a tasty snack, I hurried through the double doors.

Instead of eight booths and eight queues, there was just one queue, eight times as long. “If someone else is in my body by the time I get back, I’m going to write a strongly worded letter of complaint,” I said with a sigh as I took my place at the back of the queue. I kept my head down and didn’t speak to anyone.

When I finally reached the front of the queue, the man behind the glass took my forms. No smile. No greeting. No men in black jumpsuits. He flicked through the papers, double stamped them, scrawled a huge “F” in his red pen on the top form and circled it.

“You’re grading my form filling?” I asked in disbelief.

His attention jumped up from the forms to my face. He looked surprised I’d spoken. “‘F’ is for Facilitator. Your job.”

I was about to lose my temper at the million things I didn’t know, then I remembered Mike. I moderated my tone. “I think you’re confused. I don’t need a job. I’m not staying. Surely something in those forms explains that.”

“You’re not staying?” He frowned at me as if I were speaking another language. “What do you mean you’re not staying?”

I leaned closer and lowered my voice. “I’m only here temporarily. I need to get through here and back to my body.”

His head jerked back and he turned it so he was staring at me from the corner of his eyes, and then he scanned around the room as if he was going to call someone over.

I was not going through this whole process over again. I was just not. Who knew what would happen to my amazing body if I got caught up in that ridiculous queuing system like Mike? I snapped my fingers and pointed to him. “Just kidding with you. Is it just through here?”

I didn’t wait for him to answer. I walked past the booth and along yet another beige corridor, checking over my shoulder all the way for the black jumpsuits. The corridor behind me remained empty. This time the double doors opened up into a waiting area the size of a football field. To the right a huge, blank screen the size of a fence panel was suspended from the ceiling, to the left were rows, and rows, and rows of seats, nearly all of them occupied. I spied an empty one and headed over. The place had the vibe of an airport waiting lounge, only it was ten times bigger than any one I’d ever been in and much less exciting. This had to be the last stop. Had to be. All I had to do now was make it through here and I’d be back to my body in no time.

The same chatter tape played to mask the silence, but now I knew it was a tape it had a much more sinister feel. Nearly everyone was staring straight ahead with a vacant expression. I nestled myself between an elderly lady, who was doing something very complicated with five small knitting needles and tie-dyed wool, and a teenage girl wearing an “I’m 18 today” badge the size of a dinner plate. Just as well she was zombified because if that had been me, dying just as everything became legal, Charon wouldn’t have seen me for dust. And where had grandma got her knitting? How had that survived the crossover from life to death? Unless she wasn’t dead either.

The elderly lady looked me over with a frown. The teenager ignored me, but that might not have been because she was a dead zombie like the rest. That might have just been because she was a teenager. Who knew?

“You seem a little more lively than the rest of them,” the elderly lady commented as she switched the needles around in her hands. I had no clue what she could possibly be doing or making.

“It’s because I am alive. And I’d say the same for you since you’re wielding those five needles quite effectively.”

“Ah, finally. Someone who speaks.” She smiled at me. “If it wasn’t for this stupid chatter loop, I’d think I’d gone deaf.”

“I wouldn’t mind going deaf for a while if it meant I didn’t have to listen to this chatter loop,” I countered.

“I’m learning to drown it out.”

“Are you trying to get back to your body too?”

Before she could respond, a buzzer sounded and a name flashed up in red on the screen. Daphne Herald. A lady I assumed was Daphne, ten or so rows in ahead, stood and walked through the double doors underneath the sign. The screen went dark.

I pointed to the screen and then the double doors. “What just happened?”

The lady shook her head. “Oh, who knows? Your name flashes up and you go through the doors. I don’t know who, what, where or why is beyond them so don’t ask me.”

I huffed out a breath. “Probably another queue.”

She chuckled and switched her needles again. “Probably. What did you get?” She jerked her head at my forms.

I held it up to show her my failing grade. “F for Facilitator, but I’m only here temporarily.”

She paused in her knitting. “What do you mean?”

“Well, I’m not dead, I’m just giving the doctors time to fill me full of drugs so when I slip back inside myself I won’t be in pain.”

“Who told you that? That’s not how it works.”

“What do you mean?” I asked, scanning the room to make sure no black jumpsuits were around to witness our conversation.

She shook her head. “If you’re here, you’re dead.”

“No, no, no. I have it on excellent authority I’m just passing through,” I told her with a swipe of my hand. “Excellent authority.”

“Unless God is your excellent authority and he’s given you a pass, if you’re here, you’re dead.”

“It wasn’t God but it was close. Sort of.” Was Charon a god? Was he a demigod? My Greek history was a little rusty on the finer details. It would be handy if Odysseus popped up about now so I could hitch a ride back with him. How had Odysseus gotten home again? If I’d known that ancient Greek legends were going to have practical real life applications, I’d have paid more attention in school.

“I like your hair. I wish I’d died when I was younger,” said the older lady with a wistfulness tone, jarring me out of my poor attempt at escape planning.

I frowned at her. “Really?”

“Uh-huh. Now I have to spend eternity as an old woman. At least my arthritis is better though.” She wiggled her knotted fingers at me. “There’s always a silver lining if you’re willing to look.”

“At least you got to live a full life.”

The lady shrugged. “It all seems a bit pointless now though, don’t you think?”

“Do I think my life was pointless?” I didn’t really like the direction this conversation was going. “It wasn’t the best it could have been, I suppose, but I intend to make it a lot more fun when I get back to my body. Talk about a wake-up call.”

“You want to think your life had meaning, purpose. And then you die and you realise it was all just pointless.” She placed her knitting on the floor at her feet and stood up. She waved her arms in the air. “Pointless!” she screeched at the top of her voice. “It’s all just so pointless.” She sat back down, picked up her knitting and turned to me. “Don’t you think?”

I gave her a small nod, keeping my eyes on those five needles her dexterous fingers were twisting wool around without her even looking. “Sure. Pointless. I agree.”

I was like a magnet for crazy people. It was one of the reasons I never used public transport. It didn’t matter if the bus or train carriage was empty or packed, that crazy person always found me. Death, or my temporary ghostly state, was similar to public transport, it appeared. Wasn’t that just lovely?

A GB walked out through the doors Daphne had gone through moments earlier. He headed straight for us. I stared directly ahead, fairly sure I knew how this was going to go.

He stopped in front of the lady next to me. “Excuse me, ma’am, can you come with me, please?”

“I’m busy,” she told him with a toss of her head.

“Now, please, ma’am.” He held out his hand to her and she flung her knitting, five needles and all, in his face and took off running along the aisle.

Mr GB cursed and chased after her. For an elderly lady, she was pretty spry. I guess death was good for all kinds of joint problems. She led him a merry dance around the waiting room. And she was fast. She zipped in and out of the aisles, clambering over empty chairs to try to lose him, all the while calling him a host of rather impolite names to taunt him. It was the best entertainment I’d had in a good, long time and yet no one else’s head even turned as she charged past.

As she ran past me again she grinned and gave me a wave. I waved back. I couldn’t help it, she just looked so happy. Mr GB leaped the row of chairs in between and launched himself onto her back. They hit the ground so hard with him on her back I was amazed she didn’t break anything. Personally I thought she had a good case for GB brutality. He handcuffed and pulled her up, ignoring her protests and insults.

“Do you think it’s all pointless too?” he asked me over her yells.

“Tell him you do,” she shouted at me. “Tell him that there’s no point in living at all now, since we don’t die. Tell him there’s no point in going on. Tell him we might as well be dead. Tell him you want a time machine so you can go back to the seventies and kill me when I was young. Tell him you want shepherd’s pie for tea.”

Mr GB shook her handcuffed wrists as if that would quieten her. It didn’t.

“Well?” He raised his voice to be heard over her madness.

I cast a glance at the quite clearly crazy old lady and then back to him. Something told me that giving an honest response at this current moment wasn’t going to do me any favours.

I put on my most zombified expression. “I was just in the supermarket. I had fish fingers in the trolley. They’ll have defrosted by now.”

“No. She told me to do it. She’s faking it. She faking it!” she screamed.

“What brand of fish fingers?” he asked.

What brand of fish fingers? What. The. Hell. What was I supposed to say? I don’t know because the woman I stole that vague remark off didn’t specify. What would one of these other people say? Would they say anything? I did not want to be handcuff and put in a cell with the crazy lady and Mike. They’d kill me. I’d never get back to my body.

“Michael’s favourite,” I said. It seemed like a decently vague response.

“Who’s Michael?” he asked.

I figured the more I said, the more likely I was to give myself away as a sane, conscious, undead person, so I did what I’d seen most of these people do. I cried. Well, not cried exactly, but I snivelled, wiped at my eyes and hung my head.

That seemed to suffice since he grunted and turned away, pushing the still screaming elderly lady ahead of him. I glanced down at her knitting basket and the needles and pile of wool on the floor. Now it was laid flat, I could see it was a sock.

“This has to be the weirdest day of my life.” I shook my head as I thought about that for a moment. “I really hope this is the weirdest day of my life.”

“It’s my birthday.” The teenager next to me said. “Will you sing me happy birthday?”

I glanced at her. Her eyes seemed more alert than when I’d sat down. Maybe she’d noticed the commotion after all.

I gave her my standard line. “I was just in the supermarket. I had fish fingers in the trolley. They’ll have defrosted by now.” I wasn’t getting involved in anything. I was going to sit here in a vacant silence until my name flashed up on that board and I could be reunited with my body. I desperately didn’t want to stay here. These people were crazy.

When my name finally flashed up on the screen, I got up and walked through the doors. Not too fast, not too slow, just adequately zombie-esque. The teenager had tried to engage me in conversation a couple more times, but I’d persisted in my fish finger drama until she, rather loudly and rather rudely, told me where I could shove my fish fingers. And then Mr GB man came for her too.

The room beyond was totally white and totally empty except for a tiny woman with long, auburn hair and big brown eyes like chocolate buttons. She had a sprinkling of freckles across her nose, but instead of looking cute and impish, she seemed cartoonishly out of proportion. She looked up from the brown paper file she held.

“Bridget Sway?”

“Yes.” I glanced around the room. It was about the size of my kitchen. “And you are?”

“My name’s Bertha. There’s been some sort of hiccup with your processing, so you get to go straight to work.” She held out her hand for my forms.

“Work?” I shook my head. “No, no, no, no, no. There’s definitely been some sort of hiccup with my processing because I need someone to take me back to my body.”

“That’s nice.” She gave me a practiced smile and waved her extended hand for my forms again.

“Yes, yes, it would be. Are you taking me? I can direct you to the hospital.”

“Stop speaking, please.” She waggled her still outstretched hand, her smile dropping as she arched an eyebrow. The effect was very petulant fairy-like.

“Absolutely. As soon as you take me to the hospital. It will be St Jude’s.”

“Just give me your forms.”

I clutched them to my chest. “You can have them once I’m back with my body.”

She sighed and dropped her hand. “You’re not getting back into your body. You’re dead. Give me your damn forms.”

I shook my head and backed up a step. “No. No, I’ve just been processed incorrectly. I can go back through.” I would if I had to. I didn’t want to, but I would.

Bertha stepped forward and dropped her voice. “Listen to me, you bimbo, you’re dead. You’re not getting back into your body. You can’t get back into your body. You no longer have a body. Someone morgue person is probably elbow deep in your corpse right now, squelching your organs out of the way to find your cause of death. You’re done. Finito. No more. Dead. So give me your forms before I call the GBs and let them take you away.”

As I rule, I’m not an aggressive person, but I just did not like her tone. Or her words. Or her general attitude. She did have nice hair though.

“Listen to me, you munchkin. I’m not dead. Charon said so. He said as long as my heart was beating, I could get back into my body. So go and collect the rest of your Oompa Loompa friends and take me to my gorgeous body before the idiot doctors pull the life support plug on me because I’m not waking up and I get stuck here with you.”

Bertha laughed. It was like nails down a chalkboard. “The idiot doctors have pulled the plug, or you wouldn’t be here.”

I shook my head again. “No, no, no. I’m definitely alive. Definitely. Charon took Odysseus into the underworld and he was alive.”

Bertha’s huge eyes stretched impossibly wide as they darted all over the room. “There’s an alive person here?”

Okay.

“Yes. Me.”

“You’re not alive!” She clapped her hands to emphasis her screech. “If you were, you wouldn’t have made it all the way through Afterlife Arrivals without someone noticing. You wouldn’t even be able to see us. Out-of-body experiences happen on the plane in between the alive and the dead world so neither can see you. Now give me your goddamn forms!” She clapped again as she stamped her foot and thrust her hand in my direction.

I stared into her face. That’s why there was no express queue. That’s why no one knew what I was talking about. My stomach dropped. It all made sense, really. I just hadn’t wanted to see it. I thought back to my body. I guess there really had been a lot of blood. “You’re not lying to me? I’m really dead?”

“Finally!” She clapped again and then snatched the forms from my hands.

I frowned at her. “But … I’ve got things to do. I’ve got a party on Saturday. I’ve got to make my cheating fiancé pay. I’ve got to visit my mum at Christmas. I’ve got a facial booked in for tomorrow afternoon. This isn’t happening. This can’t be happening.” I shook my head. “I’m just dreaming. This is definitely not happening. This is a coma dream from that bad morphine. I just need to get through this last stage and I’ll wake up. That’s all. Just this one last stage.”

Bertha’s arm shot out and her open palm struck me across the face. “Do you believe you’re awake now?”

“Did you just—” I felt my burning cheek. “Did you really just— You just slapped me.”

She nodded, a fake apologetic expression on her face. “I was going to pinch you, but you seem extremely dumb and I doubted that would’ve worked. I thought a knock to the head might jar some sense loose.”

“I cannot believe you just slapped me.” I pressed the cooler back of my hand to my burning cheek. “Are we in school? Are we in some dodgy reality TV show? Did I steal your boyfriend?”

“As if you could steal my boyfriend,” she scoffed as she looked me over. “And now we’re all convinced you’re dead, let’s get you to work.”

“What? No. I’m not going to work.” I stared at her. Dazed. Though that was more due to the fact she’d had the gall to flat out say I couldn’t steal her boyfriend more than the slap or the “dead” revelation. I could totally have stolen her boyfriend if I’d wanted to.

“You had an induction so they must have told you about your job? That you have to work?”

“I’m really dead?” I asked.

“Yes,” Bertha gritted out with exaggerated patience, “you’re really dead. Can we move past this now?”

I shook my head. “I’m not sure I can.”

She thrust her hands onto her hips, my forms still in her hand, and angled her head. “Do you need another slap?” When I didn’t respond, she shook her head to herself and began flipping through my forms.

So, I was dead. Charon had lied to get me on the bus. But then he’d also gotten me ice cream so, really, how mad could I be at him? I wasn’t going to be mad at myself for not seeing the bus because that would be futile. I could, however, be plenty mad at Bertha for her lack of empathy for my current situation. And for calling me dumb. And for saying I couldn’t steal her boyfriend. And for convincing me I was dead. I know the saying goes that you shouldn’t shoot the messenger, but slapping was okay, right? You could just slap them a little?

“Oh, Bertha?”

Bertha looked up. I channelled the most lairy reality TV stars I could think of, pulled my arm back and let it fly. My palm struck Bertha’s face with such force it knocked her to the ground. I shook my hand out and sighed, satisfied with the result. Bertha stared up at me, clutching her cheek.

“Let that be a lesson to you. Be nice to newly dead folks. It’s tough for us.” I reached my hand out to help her up. Now I’d knocked her on her ass, I felt we could be civil. “About this job? I have experience in event planning. The dead still have parties, right? Get married? Have anniversaries? Birthdays?”

Bertha dropped her hand from her cheek and her face stretched into a huge smile as she looked up at me. “You didn’t get a very thorough induction at all, did you?” She laughed as she picked herself up, ignoring my hand. “Well, won’t this be fun for you?”

I did not like the sound of that. I did not like the sound of that at all.

Keep reading for a sneak peek of Beyond Dead

Dear reader,

Dear Reader,

I very much hope you’ve enjoyed Just a Touch Dead. If you did then keep reading because there’s a short extract of Beyond Dead, the first full novel in the series, for you to have a peek at after this letter.

I know this novella ended on a bit of a cliff hanger but I wrote it after Beyond Dead as a little something extra for newsletter subscribers. If you’re already like, “You’ve got me! What happens when Bridget gets to work?” then the links to Beyond Dead are below.

Amazon US: https://www.amazon.com/Beyond-Dead-Bridget-Paranormal-Mystery-ebook/dp/B01CMJIBJ8/

Everywhere else: books2read.com/JordainaSydneyRobinson-BeyondDead

If you’re not a absolutely sure about Bridget yet then keep reading for a sneak peak and the start of Bridget’s first real adventure.

Or, if you’re a little intrigued about me (I’ve no idea why you would be—I’m very dull!), you can snoop on me at www.JordainaSydneyRobinson.com or www.facebook.com/JordainaSydneyRobinson Or if you have a questions that you can’t find the answer to on my social stuff then you can email me at enquiries@JordainaSydneyRobinson.com

So, thank you so much for reading Just a Touch Dead. It’s been a pleasure having your company. I hope to hear from you soon and to see you on Bridget’s next adventure.

Until we meet again …

Jordaina :)

Chapter One

I’d always had a problem being punctual. My mum used to say I’d be late for my own funeral. Thankfully that wasn’t being held for another week or so yet, not that I was exactly sure what the etiquette would be for me attending. I’d probably still be late, though. And I mean ghost-me would be late, not dead-body-me. Dead-body-me’s punctuality was in someone else’s hands, so I was fairly certain that me would be on time.

I wasn’t even sure if I’d be able to get the time off work. Yes, you heard me right. I had a job. One that I was running late for. Though technically, being dead, I suppose I was “late” for everything now. And, in all fairness, I didn’t feel my lack of punctuality in this instance was entirely my fault. It was the fault of whoever had crammed a dead-ghost-guy into my locker.

Of course I wasn’t completely sure he was dead. Or doubly dead. I didn’t even know if ghosts could die. You see it in movies all the time, ghosts reverting back to their “death form” or whatever to scare people. It was highly possible he was waiting for me to try to get something out of my locker before springing to life and scaring me to death, if you’ll excuse the pun. An initiation of sorts. Though if that’s what it was, he had the patience of a saint because I’d been staring at him for nearly twenty minutes and he’d yet to so much as twitch.

Initiation or not, I hoped he’d not bled onto my uniform because I was pretty sure the Bureau of Ghostly Affairs would deduct it from my measly pay cheque. That was if they paid me at all. They’d been conveniently sketchy on the pay details during my very brief “Welcome to Your Afterlife” induction. In fact, they’d been sketchy on all the details. The only two things I knew for sure was that I was dead and I still had to work.

“Hey! Bridget!” Bertha strode into the ladies’ locker room, all skinny five feet of her clearly meaning business. “Move your fake-tanned ass! Get your uniform on and let’s go!” She had an annoying habit of punctuating every exclamation with a sharp clap. And my ass was not fake-tanned.

“I’d love to, Bertha. Really I would. It’s always been my dream to toil for eternity with limited rewards in the belted mauve sack you call a uniform, but, unfortunately, someone’s crammed a dead-ghost-guy into my locker, which is sadly preventing me from getting to it.” I flashed my recently bleached teeth at her. “Any suggestions?”

Bertha harrumphed, covering the space between us in a flurry of fairy strides. She glanced at the contents of my locker and paused mid-step. Frozen in place, with her knee in the air, she toppled backwards and hit the floor with a thud in a dead faint.

“I’ll take that as a ‘no’ then, shall I?”

No one would ever have described me as squeamish, but in life a dead body probably would’ve elicited more from me than a staring match with the victim. However, it seemed my shock receptors had frazzled out after the whole dying and becoming a ghost thing. I was certain I’d feel differently in the morning, though I was hoping they’d have moved him by then.

Alex, Bertha’s partner, pushed the heavy locker room door ajar and called Bertha’s name through the crack.

“She’s fainted,” I said as I stared at her prone form, feeling oddly detached. I should probably care about this. “You’d better come in.”

“Fainted?” Alex poked his head into the room. His eyes widened in worry when he saw her. As if unaccustomed to moving faster than a strut, Alex scurried awkwardly over and knelt by Bertha’s side. “Get me some water to splash on her face,” he instructed me without taking his eyes from her.

“Me?”

“Yes, you.” He pointed through the archway to the shower area at the far end of the room. “Go.”

I folded my arms and pursed my lips. I’d always had a bit of a problem with authority.

“What are you waiting for?” he asked when he glanced up to see me still sitting there.

“A ‘please’ would be nice.”

“What?” Alex stared blankly at me. “Fine. Whatever. Please can you please get me some water please? Was that okay?”

“It was passable.” I adjusted my white suit jacket as I stood and then headed across the murky grey linoleum. “It would’ve worked better without the attitude, though. She’s only fainted.”

I walked under the arch and into the open area beyond. It was like a school shower room flashback. A central wall divided the room. Shower cubicles lined the far left wall and toilet cubicles faced them on the central divide. A row of sinks ran along both walls to the right with individual mirrors above them. In what world did twice as many sinks as there were toilets make sense? Several sporadically arranged empty blue tumblers stood on the thin shelves above the sinks. I rinsed one before filling it and caught my reflection in the soap smeared mirror.

Thankfully I’d had my fire engine red hair coloured and trimmed a few days earlier. It usually made my sky blue eyes look electric and my skin appear sun-kissed; today I just looked haggard, tired and sallow. Death did not look good on me. Leaning closer to inspect the dark circles under my eyes, I realised my white trouser suit probably wasn’t helping my deathly complexion. I’d have to go shopping for a whole new wardrobe on my next day off. That’s if I got a day off. And where did the dead shop? I readjusted my perfectly trimmed fringe and sighed. Alive or dead, the important stuff was never in the inductions.

“What are you doing in there?” Alex snapped, interrupting my mental shopping list. I’d started to list individual things and then realised I should just change it to one word: everything.

I walked back across the floor, handed Alex the tumbler and then flopped heavily down on the wooden bench next to him. I was too tired to do anything but watch while he tended Bertha. Dying had really taken it out of me.

Alex was tall, dark and almost handsome. He ticked all the boxes on paper – muscled, square jaw, boyish dimples, perfect smile – but somehow didn’t pull it off in reality. I couldn’t quite put my finger on why. A bit like Bertha. She was dainty with long auburn hair and big brown eyes like pots of melted chocolate. She had a dusting of freckles across her nose, but instead of looking petite and delicate her features seemed oddly out of proportion.

Alex moved Bertha’s head so it rested on his knees and then flicked a few drops of water onto her face. No reaction. He sprinkled a little more then dragged a rough hand through his neatly styled short hair. “What happened? What did you do?”

“Me?” My voice hitched up an indignant octave. “Nothing!”

“And why aren’t you dressed for your shift?” He sprinkled a few more drops onto Bertha’s face, to no avail. “First impressions count.”

Yeah. And my first impressions of this afterlife business so far? Not impressed. “Give me that.” I took the tumbler from his hands as he gently tapped Bertha’s cheeks. We were going to be here all day at this rate.

“Well?”

I stared at him blankly. “Well what?”

“Why aren’t you dressed?” he gritted out. Clearly neither he nor Bertha dealt with stress very well.

“Oh. Right.” I nodded to my locker. “Dead-ghost-guy.”

Alex’s head spun around so fast I heard his neck crack. And while he was distracted I threw the contents of the tumbler in Bertha’s face.

∞

Something heavy slammed onto the table, waking me with a start. I sat bolt upright to find Detective Johnson was back for another round of “ask a stupid question”. The short, plump man that could’ve passed for Colombo, except for his lack of hair and downturned mouth, removed his flattened palm from the table and then settled himself in the chair opposite.

I squinted as I watched him. The fluorescent light played off the white walls and one-way mirror, stinging my tired eyes. I studiously avoided checking my reflection; florescent lighting did nothing for me.

“So, you just found him there?” Detective Johnson casually flipped through the loose sheets in his official-looking brown paper folder.

Found who? What was he talking about? Ah, that’s right, it all came rushing back in a slideshow of misery. I glanced at the clock. He’d locked me in the interview room for six hours. Six hours. I rubbed my eyes, only remembering mid rub that I wasn’t wearing waterproof mascara. I inspected the damage in the one-way mirror, I couldn’t help it. And now I could add two black eyes to my list of problems.

“Well?” He drummed each finger on his right hand on the white Formica tabletop.

“Well what?” I tore my eyes away from the disaster that was my reflection. There was no salvaging the mascara.

“You just found him there?” He wore a bland expression that matched his tone and probably his personality.

“Yes.” I sighed. I was sure I’d told him this at least a trillion times already. “I just found him there.”

“You just found him?”

“Are you a parrot or a detective? Yes, I just found him.”

“Uh-huh.” He nodded and flipped through a few more loose sheets. The minutes stretched out as he read something in silence. Finally he closed the file and stared at me. He drummed his right hand on the table again. That was going to get annoying.

“Okay. You’re right. You got me.” I held up my hands in surrender, far too tired for a battle-of-wills staring match. “I killed him and stuffed his body in my locker, hoping to deflect suspicion from myself in an extremely clever way.”

“I suppose you think that’s funny.”

I leaned towards him. “No, I think it’s frustrating. It doesn’t matter how many different ways you ask me, my answer will still be ‘I found him there’. Do you know why?”

“Why?”

I threw my hands up in frustration. “Because I found him there!”

“Uh-huh.” He stared at me for another long moment then returned to flicking through the folder, unruffled by my outburst. He spoke without lifting his eyes. “I’ve been unable to verify your alibi.”

“Somehow I’m not surprised by that.” I sighed again, thinking that said more about his detecting skills than my guilt.

“No one at Arrivals can vouch for your constant presence.” No expression, no intonation in his voice, no habitual tie straightening. Only that damn finger drumming.

“Right. So. You think what?” I leaned back in my chair, eyebrows raised. “That I died, somehow zipped over from Arrivals to wherever this guy was, killed him, dragged him to the ladies’ locker room, stuffed him into a locker I didn’t know I was going to be assigned, and then rode a cloud back to Arrivals to give myself an alibi?”

“So, you’d never met him before today?”

“I only died today. When could I possibly have met him?”

“You died three days ago.”

Had I spent three days in that nightmare of afterlife airport? “Well, y’know what? I’ve not been to bed since I died, so it’s still to-goddamn-day to me.”

Drum, drum, drum of his fingers on the table. “That doesn’t answer my question, Miss Sway.”

I watched the fingers on his right hand still. My left eye twitched as I waited for the next round and something occurred to me. “Is this Hell?”

“So, you’d never met him before today?” Johnson repeated, calm and unperturbed.

I folded my arms on the table, rested my head on them and tried to go back to sleep. Okay, so I might have had a slightly bigger problem with authority than I initially made out.

“Are you refusing to cooperate?”

My head shot back up. “Are you kidding me right now? What is still yesterday morning to me, I got fired, found my fiancé cheating on me and then got hit by a bus, which, since it killed me, you think would be the end of it. But noooooo. After dying, I spent hours riding the Bus of Death with Charon, who, by the way, does not observe any traffic laws. And which I personally thought was an extremely insensitive mode of transport in my particular circumstances. Then I spent the next three days, according to you, in Afterlife Arrivals, which is worse than any airport I have ever experienced. And I’ve been through Charles De Gaulle.

“Then I was sent to start my new job immediately, and FYI working in your afterlife sucks, only to find a dead dead guy in my locker, bleeding over my uniform, which you guys” – I jabbed a finger at not-Colombo as if he were personally responsible – “will probably charge me for. So, believe me when I tell you I have cooperated to the fullest extent of my current capacity.”

Detective Johnson considered me for a long moment, drumming his damn fingers on the table. If it carried on, I was going to break them. I just was. I wouldn’t be able to help myself.

“Constable?” Johnson didn’t raise his voice, but an older gentleman with a kind face and a twinkle in his eyes sidestepped through the door.

“Yes, sir?”

“Can you accompany Miss Sway to her GA meeting please?” Johnson watched me while speaking to the constable. I don’t know what he hoped to see on my face, maybe a flash of guilty victory. The only thing he got was confusion. Pretty much the same look I’d worn since I died.

“Yes, sir.” The constable, dressed in the same style of black suit as Johnson, stepped further into the room and held open the door. “Miss Sway?”

“You’re free to go,” Johnson said.

I glanced from him to the constable and back, almost fearing a trick. Saying nothing, I stood, straightened my suit jacket and then headed to the door with the confident stride of an innocent woman.

“For now,” Johnson added as I stepped out of the interrogation room and tripped over my own foot. I winced. Way to look guilty.

Outside of the interrogation room, the large office was open plan. It was a hive of activity with the human worker bees clad in black suits and white shirts. The only difference was the ties. Some people wore navy while the majority wore pastel blue like my constable. I even clocked a couple of lilac like Johnson. I guessed they used them to define rank instead of stripes on the shoulder.

I scanned along the neat potato waffle arrangement of desks as we walked through the office. No desk clutter anywhere. No pictures. No posters. No toys.

“Is this the homicide division?” I’d never been inside a real life police station, but I imagined they had a lot less personnel devoted to murders. A bigger homicide department meant a higher murder rate, didn't it? How ironic; I was more likely to be murdered after I died.

The constable nodded. “Yes, but this department looks after a much wider catchment than a normal police department.”

I followed him along one of the narrow aisles, turning in a circle to get the full effect of the room. “How much larger?”

His lips pulled into a small smile and pride shone through his voice. “About the size of Europe.”

“Huh.” I made eye contact with at least four navy ties and one pastel blue; all stared at me as if I were something they’d scrapped off their shoe. Maybe Johnson had stamped “criminal” on my forehead while I slept.

“You look like you’re chewing a wasp.” The constable smiled and pointed a thick finger at my face. “Spit it out.”

“Oh.” I pushed a loose strand of hair back in my chignon and readjusted the bobby pin. “I thought this department was huge but, if it's looking after a Europe-sized amount of people, it’s actually quite small.” Like, maybe, ineffectually small.

“You don’t grow old here. You don’t die unless it’s by another ghost’s hand, accidental or not. We, with the occasional assistance of the GBs, have a one hundred per cent case closure rate.” He met my eyes. “All murders are solved. Some just take longer than others.”

“What are GBs? And what’s a typical case closure time? And roughly how many murders are we talking per year? Wait, do we have prisons here? We must do. Are the laws the same? We have police, so there must be a justice system, right? Is the crime rate worse in certain areas? Is there a crime rate at all? There must be. There must be other crimes than murder?”

The constable laughed softly and held up his hands against the barrage of questions. “Whoa, there.”

“Sorry, I can get a bit …” I swept my fringe out of my eyes, feeling a blush warm my cheeks. At least that would help my complexion. “No one’s really told me anything.”

“I was the same when I first got here. I took a breath between questions, though.” He leaned in and lowered his voice. “The GBs, the Ghosting Busters, are our specialised police force, like the FBI or Interpol. They deal with a variety of crimes, from murder to unauthorised hauntings. The rest you don’t really need to know.”

I disagreed resoundingly with that last comment, but his reluctance to talk about it prevented me from asking. Did he mean the rest of things they dealt with or the answers to my other questions?

We headed out of the double doors at the end of the office into a square room twice the size of the interrogation room with pale green walls, a white ceiling and dimmed lighting. The word “Arrivals" was painted in black capital letters on the right hand wall. On the dark green floor beneath it ran two rows of eight white circles, each circle just over a foot in diameter. The left side of the room was set up the same except that wall had "Departures" painted on it.

A man in his early twenties with short blond hair and a navy tie appeared on one of the circles to the right.

“Evening, Herb,” he said with a nod to the constable as he passed us.

“I was hoping we could take a taxi. Or maybe walk?” I said, staring at the circle the man had appeared on. I’d done this transporting thing twice, once from Afterlife Arrivals and once to here. It had not gone well either time.

“I’ll be gentle,” the constable promised, moving to a circle on the departures side and offering me his hand.

Reluctantly, I moved towards him. “Where are we going?”

“Your GA meeting.”

“Oh, er, look, Officer. I’m not a gambler, so I’m good to go straight home.” Wherever that was.

They had a police station so surely they had living quarters. A vision of a long ago school trip where all the girls slept in a large dormitory with only two showers reared its incredibly unwelcome head. I shivered. Never again. Things might be different now I was dead, but I still had standards.

“Call me Herb. And your GA meeting is your Ghostly Acclimatisation meeting.” Taking my hand, he positioned me close to the little white circle he was standing on. “Nothing to do with gambling.”

“Oh.” Right. Of course. Something else that wasn’t in the induction.

His eyes twinkled at me. “It’ll be good for you. I know you have a lot of questions.” He clasped both my hands in his. “Ready?”

“Not really.”

Pressure bore down on me from all sides. When I didn’t think I could take anymore, the world blurred and tossed me around like a rag doll in a tumble dryer. My stomach was seriously considering an evacuation plan when the turbulence stopped as abruptly as it had started and I landed hard on my bottom.

“Phew, that was a tough one. I’m sorry, I forgot it was rush hour.” Herb leaned over and looked into my spinning pupils. “Are you okay?”

I would have answered but the concept of trying to think of several words and then place them in any coherent order was temporarily beyond me. At least I hadn’t thrown up that time. Silver lining.

Herb sat down next to me on the grass. The summer sun was still warm, and for a moment I could close my eyes and pretend I was lazing in Regent’s Park with Michael, the ex-fiancé. Thoughts of that cheating scumbag brought me out of that daydream quick smart. To distract myself from the last indelicate image I had of him, I looked around and was surprised to recognise the view below. It’d been nearly ten years since I’d been home, but the harbour, the curve of the beach and the row on row of townhouses inching back from the sea were exactly as I remembered.

I knew without looking that the hill fort would be directly behind me, and off to the left would be the brick outlined ruins of the rest of the castle. I knew on both sides and to my back that the only view would be of the sea, and if I looked directly down from our grassy knoll I’d have a clear view of the tree-lined steep hill that led up to the fort. I also knew I’d be able to pick out the tree I’d carved my name into many moons ago, even from this distance.

I inhaled a deep breath and felt the salty air tickle my throat. “We’re in Scarborough.”

Herb smiled and nodded. “My wife and I used to holiday here every summer.”

There was such a wistfulness to his voice I almost asked when she had passed away before I realised he was the one who’d died. This was going to take some getting used to.

“I grew up here.” The boats that dotted the horizon, the sea salt on the breeze, the crying seagulls, the specks on the beach that I knew were donkeys, all comfortingly familiar.

“Then you should feel right at home.” Herb handed me a silver hip flask and a hankie. “Before you go on in.”

“Oh, that’s very kind.” I smiled, grateful for the offer of the alcohol if slightly confused about the hankie. “But I’m more of a martini type of girl. Whisky goes straight to my head.”

Herb gestured to my face. “It’s the closest thing I’ve got to a mirror. Thought you might want to tidy yourself up a bit. Can’t let this be their first impression of you.”

Remembering the horror staring back at me from the interrogation room mirror, I accepted the flask. Despite my distorted reflection I could still make out the clumps of hair that had worked their way out of the neat chignon, the smudged black eyes, and I’d managed to get a streak of lip gloss on my chin.

“How do I look?” I turned to Herb after frantically smoothing my hair over and wiping away as much of the mascara from under my eyes as possible.

“Beautiful.” He smiled and returned the hip flask to his inside jacket pocket before pulling me to my feet. “Now in you go before they class you as late. Mr Salier will be waiting out here to collect you when the meeting’s over.”

“Who’s Mr Salier?” I very much felt like I was being passed from pillar to post, and neither really wanted me.

“He’ll be your … guardian, so you just wait for him, you hear?” He raised his grey eyebrows in warning.

I pouted. I couldn’t help it. It was like getting told off by my grandpa. “I’m not going to go wandering off into trouble.”

Herb smiled widely and shook his head. “Ah, Miss Sway. You strike me as the type of child that’s never out of trouble.”

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Table of Contents

- A long silence.

- “Oh, I’m sorry.” Delilah shook her head. “That’s—”

- “I wasn’t kidding. I need to get—”