Dead on Arrival Read online

Copyright © 2013, Crystal Lynn Hilbert

  ISBN 9781310130304

  This story is a work of fiction. Any resemblance to persons living, dead, or otherwise is purely coincidental.

  Cover art © 2014, Crystal Lynn Hilbert.

  The font used on the cover design is Travelling Typewriter by Carl Krull.

  Wedged sideways in the ass crack of Tuesday at too-damn-early a.m., Max heaved himself out bed and, grumbling, lurched off for a shave. He didn’t do a very good job of it.

  In fact, he died.

  While holding his face to get at the tricky bit by his ear, Max nicked his finger, flinched, and sliced a line down his jaw instead. Blood speckled the sink. Not much—not yet, anyway—just enough to ruin his morning. Max flung the razor into the bowl, cussing blue.

  But, of course, his razor hit the faucet and bounced out, onto the floor. So when Max stomped off to get a towel, he slammed the heel of his foot into the upturned blade, slipped and fell.

  The back of his head cracked the porcelain sink, and then, for good measure, bounced off the tile floor.

  Consciousness in, consciousness out.

  World swimming, teeth clenched, Max dragged himself up. He groped a towel off the side of the tub and tried to stop the bleeding, but he’d already left a nasty stain on the floor and he ended up trying to clean that instead. Because shit, yeah? If he stained the tile, there went his safety deposit out the fucking window.

  So Max mopped at the floor while his vision blurred and swam, and the pounding in his ears split into a shrill ring. He had to—had to do something… important. But when he tried to stand, he ended up retching into the tub.

  Fucking hell, this day.

  Max crawled upright. Leaning hard against the wall for balance, he staggered into his room and toppled into bed, burying his face in a pillow. He’d phone in to work later. Just, right now, he needed a lie down. Just for a minute. Maybe ten.

  Only, he couldn’t work his fingers. Max tried to pull the covers over his head, but he couldn’t find his arms. He felt cold, cold to his bones. The whole world tilted around him—cold, cold and wet, like water crashing overhead, again and again, in time to the throbbing and the ringing…

  He just needed to close his eyes a second. He’d be all right. He’d be…

  “You’re dead, Mulligan,” the answer phone snarled. “Dead. You knew how important today was and you fucking blew it. You know what? If you can’t be bothered to haul your sorry corpse out of bed today—today, of all the goddamn days—I can’t be bothered to fucking pay you. You hear me, Mulligan? You’re fired.”

  Sitting beside himself, Max listened to the recording again, watching the contents of his head leak down the side of the bed and onto the carpet. The recording stopped. A moment later, it started again.

  “You’re dead, Mulligan,” the answer phone informed him.

  Max stared at the battered back of his skull. “Well, fuck.”

  *

  When the alarm screeched bloody hell in his ear, Max jerked awake, flung himself out of bed on instinct and scrambled halfway to the bathroom before he spotted a mirror that hadn’t been there the night before.

  Max stopped. The mirror faced the bed. And there was a woman sleeping in his bed.

  “What the fuck?”

  The woman in the bed grunted and shoved a pillow over her bird’s nest of hair. His pillow. At least, it should have been his pillow. She got it from where his pillow always went, but his pillow had a blue case and this one was all gray stripes.

  “Mother of God,” he swore. “Who even are you?”

  “Nngh,” she grunted with sparkling clarity. “Shut up.”

  “Shut up? What the hell are you doing in my bed—I was not drunk.”

  The alarm went off again. Max had to find it to glare at it, and when he finally located it he found it sitting on the wrong side of the bed. A fist jumped out from the pile of covers, slammed into the top of an otherwise very happy, clock-holding plastic cat. The cat stopped yowling.

  “Look,” he tried again. “I don’t know who the hell you are, but I’m late to work and you’ve got to—”

  The woman in the bed sat up like Dracula rising out of a subpar coffin and fixed him with the most intense blue-eyed stare Max had ever seen in his life.

  “You,” she said, enunciating very clearly, “are dead.”

  “I’m not—” And then a whole lot of vague half-memories caught him up all at once and Max just looked at her.

  Well, not at her. At the bed. He remembered going to shave, a whole lot of blood. He’d gotten fired… because of the blood. And then he went to sleep. And… and at some point his landlord showed up? But he hadn’t been late with the fucking rent, even if it did cost an arm and a damn leg and… and wait.

  He’d known the landlord was there. That’s why he’d gotten up to shave. Had to get ready for the day, didn’t want to look like utter shite in front of the nice lady his leech bastard landlord had gone and brought with him. Only he’d cut his face and slipped and then…

  “I’m dead.”

  “A plus,” the blankets snarled. “Now fuck off.”

  “But, wait—wait. You were there!”

  “I was not there.”

  Max jolted across the room, back to the bed, and tried to pull the blanket off of her. “You were! I saw you. My fucking landlord as well.” He stopped trying to wrench at the covers because his hand went straight through. It made him seasick. Duvet-sick. Accusingly, he finished, “You looked in the loo. You saw me.”

  “I saw your god-awful ghost boxers. It was terrible.”

  Max risked a glance down. He found himself wearing possibly the un-sexiest drawers to ever greet the morning light, so he sidled around the side of the bed instead, and with great dignity, put the footboard between his crotch and her.

  “Most people, they see a bloke bleeding all over the tile, they think, ‘Oh, perhaps I’ll phone someone,’” he said.

  “I did,” the lump of blankets told him. “I called the landlord and said, ‘Yes, thank you, I’ll take the apartment anyway.’”

  “You could have helped me!”

  The pile shifted. The fearsome, blue-eyed head reappeared. “You’re dead. You were already dead. You saw me because the landlord was renting the apartment to me.”

  Max felt the world opening up under his feet. You’re dead, Mulligan.

  “You say that like it should be obvious!”

  “It is obvious.”

  Glowering, Max crossed his arms over his bare chest. And this was not a chest to be at all ashamed of—he lifted giant bloody bricks for a living, after all—but the way she just lay there looking, she might burn a hole straight through.

  “Still could have helped,” he insisted. “Soul in torment, and all that?”

  “The landlord would’ve thought I’d lost my mind, charged me more. Anyway, stopping the cycle won’t un-cremate you.”

  “I was cremated?”

  “Maybe. I don’t know. I look like your mother?”

  He didn’t know what to say to that. Didn’t know how to see himself in terms of body and the bits it left behind. Didn’t know how to face a stranger in his flat, how to ford the rising panic—and feeling his feet start to sink through the carpet—through the floor—Max forced himself to stop thinking about it altogether.

  He tried glaring, but the woman glared right back, and she was better at it.

  “You’re taking up the whole bed,” he tried instead and dared edge around the baseboard. “Shove over.”

  The girl in the bed pulled the covers up over her head again. “You’re dead. Go haunt the couch.”

  “Lookit the gratitude on you! It’s my bed.”

  “The fuck it is. I hauled this thing up
three flights of stairs.”

  Max started to protest, but midway through opening his mouth he realized she was actually right. His bed had been two mattresses on the floor. Right on the ground, no feet or fancy yellow footboard with fiddly flowers and bits. He’d liked being a bloke who got laid, thanks very much.

  “I can’t haunt the couch,” he said, not thinking about it, doing his damnedest to not think about it.

  “Fine, bathtub then.”

  “But I didn’t die there!” And fuck, there it was. Die. Dead. Max sunk to his ankles in the floor. But he forged on, like tearing off a plaster. “And not the couch either. So shove over.”

  The head emerged once again. “Look,” she hissed. “It’s five in the morning. Shut up.”

  Max tried a winning smile. It turned up determined, but queasy. “Dunno if anyone mentioned it to you, being as you’re a rather terrifying article, but the monster’s supposed to live under the bed.”

  A fist emerged from the covers and deployed a single, centrally located finger in his direction. Max sat down anyway. He found that as long as he thought about football scores and absolutely nothing else, he could just about manage it.

  Only, part of his leg went through the woman’s arm and suddenly Max went hot and strange, like static and fast cars and indigestion. But the woman didn’t move, didn’t even notice, so Max got up again. He paced the length of the room, encountered an unfamiliar bureau and veered right back again. Beds were beds, even ones with fancy yellow footboards. Safer territory.

  Except, once there, he found himself staring at that awful plastic cat and its damn stupid clock. Max looked at his hand. Looked at the bed sheets through his hand.

  Spain/Ireland 4-0, singing “Fields of Anthenry” from the stands.

  Steeling himself, Max jabbed a finger through the clock.

  The alarm went on again. An arm emerged and slapped it off, like an angry tentacle from the depths.

  He didn’t feel a thing. Not a frisson of electricity, not fast cars or indigestion.

  You’re dead, Mulligan.

  Max prodded his finger into its face. This time, the alarm went on and stayed on.

  Right up until the happy plastic cat sailed through his head.

  *

  Max woke to the sound of pans banging in the next room and grinned. Breakfast, he thought delightedly. Sausages, eggs, delicious crispy bacon. The stomach he didn’t have gnawed itself in anticipation and then, oh yeah, wait.

  Dead.

  Fucking brilliant start to the morning.

  “Jesus God, Charlie. What’re you up to?” he grumbled, padding into the kitchen. Per usual, she glared at him.

  Well, no, it wasn’t really a glare—more like just the way she looked at things, staring all the way through to the other side. Otherwise she seemed a fantastic ride, only, well, his Charlie came with Voodoo Stare Action and she didn’t turn it off.

  “I was having a morning,” she said, voice flat.

  Subtly, Max checked his chest to make sure she hadn’t stared a hole through him. He found he’d managed a shirt this morning—something new on his disembodied body! Only took a sodding month—and his delight at the prospect threw healthy caution to the wind. Grinning, he leaned over Charlie’s shoulder, nuzzling his chin through the crook of her neck.

  “Was it a particularly good morning? You know, without me here to brighten your day?”

  Charlie shrugged him off, elbowed him sideways in that maddening, impossible way he couldn’t bloody well figure out and glared. “No touching.”

  “All right, yeah. Don’t have a go at me.” He lifted his hands in surrender and backed up until he hit the window. Which, considering the size of the place, was about a half inch. A flea couldn’t get lost in his damn flat.

  Still, looking around... kitchen seemed a little bigger, what with most of his stuff missing now. As far as he could see, the only things left were a big cardboard box full of his old cutlery sitting on one of his rickety boot-sale chairs.

  “Nobody wanted my shit, huh?”

  Charlie shrugged, doing something complicated with vegetables in a pan. “I guess.”

  “Not even you? That sucks. My toaster goes, my table goes, my bed goes—”

  “Well, judging by the stain in there, you bled straight down through the mattress.”

  “I died over the side, thanks very much. I’m not that leaky.”

  She shrugged again and went into the fridge—still bedecked with his busty barmaid magnets, thanks very much—to collect a handful of eggs. “Nobody buys biohazards.”

  “You bought this place, and I’ve seen the bathroom grouting. There’s bits of me all in it.” Max stared mournfully at the eggs. “D’you think I could eat if I really tried?”

  “You can’t lift a fork.”

  “Bet I can,” he said, reaching into his box of junk to grab a fork. “Make me eggs if I can?” And then his fingers closed around metal.

  Pain seared up his arm, unlike any misplaced razor or bathroom sink he’d ever felt before. Just pain—pure, distilled, acid-burn pain—and Max wrenched his hand away.

  “Shit! Look at that,” he said and held up his hand to Charlie. Or, at least, where his hand would have been if it hadn’t been a searing, throbbing, ill-defined ball of mist. “It burnt me.”

  Charlie stared through him.

  Max staged a strategic retreat.

  He stood by the door blowing on his burnt fingers, watching her crack eggs into a bowl. He wasn’t much of one for things that didn’t come free out of other people’s basements, but it looked… nice. It was a nice bowl. No chips, nice color blue—and blue all over, too. Not blue-my-brother-might-have-done-with-leftover-car-paint blue. This bowl had an actual pottery blue, kind of like Charlie’s eyes.

  Which, now that he noticed, the rest of the place seemed a little less shit than normal, too. Even with her halfway through stripping the paint off the cabinets, the kitchen looked neat and tidy. She’d gotten stains off the counters that’d come with the counters. Jars lined the edges of the stove like those dolls that went inside the other dolls, full of tea bags and sugar and mysterious female things.

  Max had never seen anyone with organized jars of tea and sugar. Even his mum had just kept helter-skelter boxes in the cabinets. Charlie, though. Charlie had a lot of… things: jars, lovely bowls, mugs balanced on all the hooks and nails coming out of the wall he’d never had a purpose for, a big brick of wood with a shit-ton of knives inside.

  Which, he’d seen an advert for those on the telly once. Expensive.

  “You’ve got a lot of stuff.”

  Charlie reached around him to grab a spoon. “Yeah.”

  “Nice stuff, I mean. How’d you end up here?”

  She shrugged, tipping the bowl of frothy yellow eggs into a pan. And not at all dented either, he noticed. Max had never owned an undented pan in his life, and there she was—cooking in the kind of pan you could hang on the wall just to look pretty.

  “Place was cheap,” Charlie said.

  “Cheap? Where do you go during the days? This place took half my salary just to heat.”

  She shrugged again. Seemed like Charlie spoke mostly through varying degrees of shrug. “I got a discount.”

  “For what?”

  Charlie snorted. “For bits of you stuck in the carpet.”

  Standing in the doorway, cradling his injured hand, Max watched her—with her undented pan, her nice bowl and her shiny spatula—and decided he didn’t much trust her. “What’s your rent?”

  “What’s it matter to you? You’re not paying it.”

  “It matters. How much?”

  She stirred her eggs like nothing. “Five hundred.”

  Had he been breathing, Max might have stopped. “Five hundred. Mother of God, five hundred? A little blood in the grout, a tiny puddle of blood in the carpet—”

  “Moderately sized lake.”

  “A truly fucking minuscule amount, and Leland just goes and knocks off
four hundred dollars? Bastard.” He stopped and eyed her with suspicion. “You flashed him your tits, didn’t you?”

  Really, he shouldn’t have been so surprised Charlie shoved the skillet through his chest. And that fucker burned. It burned worse than the fork—worse even than the one time he’d accidentally set off a firecracker off his stomach—cold-hot pain searing up and down his whole frame until he didn’t even have a frame.

  Max disincorporated all over the floor, hit the ground like a ten-ton sack of sloppy mist and retreated to the ceiling light for safety. He hadn’t known he could do that before, but holy shit, thank the lord he could if Charlie felt like slaughtering poor bastards today.

  Only meanwhile, below, Charlie just turned back to the counter and scooped her eggs and red peppers off over a piece of toast.

  She didn’t look… angry, really. More like she looked sad and gray and frustrated. But he figured he’d just stay up there in the ceiling light anyway, thanks very much. Wasn’t worth the risk coming down.

  Not that he couldn’t still ogle her. From safety, anyway. All those curves and turns, looking like she could go off any second and take his legs clean off, wound up tighter than a three-quarter-inch steel cable around a whole shit ton of iron, but, Jesus, the way she walked.

  To be fair, Max decided, Charlie did have discount worthy tits.

  *

  “How’d you get this couch up here?” she asked him one afternoon, staring at the vibrant, threadbare orange sofa currently dominating the living room like a moldering, forgotten sweet.

  He’d managed to remember-on his favorite jeans today, so Max shoved his hands into his pockets, though one of the pockets popped out through a hole by the seam. Absently, he scratched his thigh, looking out the window. “It comes apart.”

  “Where at?”

  Max turned away from the few people scurrying about down below, forcing his attention away from a very tall blond in particular. “Why?” he asked, frowning.

  Charlie blew a strip of hair out of her face and looked at him like it was meant to be obvious. “It’s hideous.”

  “It’s my sofa. You are not taking my sofa.”

  Max didn’t check for holes in his chest, but he did take a quick scan of the area for any bits and bobs of metal he’d have to avoid.

  “It’s filthy,” she said. “You might not have died on it, but somebody else did.”

  “No.” Max shook his head and crossed his arms and generally made a very good show at putting his misty foot down. “That is a five hundred dollar sofa. Quality furniture. You’re not to lay a hand on it.”