Almost Dead (Dead, #1) (5 page)

“Laney, I hate to break it to you,
” says Flora, “but what are you going to do when you do find yourself? I mean, it’s not like we can magically hop back into our corpses.”

“You don’t know that!” I screech, patting the ground more furiously. It’s here somewhere. Somewhere, somewhere, somewhere. The mist coils around my neck, my to
rso and my legs. I swipe, but nothing happens. The cloud-like substance doesn’t break, or cause a ripple effect. It continues as an eternally-progressing sheet.

“
People can’t just hop into their bodies and have their spirit fully return,” Flora continues, which only aggravates me even more.

“You think you know so much, don’t you? Admit it—you’re just as pissed off as I am about being stuck in a place that doesn’t exist to sane people.” I stand
up, about to wipe off grass and dirt from my knees when I realize there isn’t any.

“Look, I don’t know where we are. I just know it’s not normal,”
Flora says, glancing around. “Not only do I
not
want to be here right now, but I don’t want to listen to your nonstop whining.”

“Oh, yeah? Like I want to be stuck with the future leader of
alcoholics across the globe.” I swivel toward my car, still hoping to catch a glimpse of my body, even though I know it’s not there. It’s close by; I can feel it. I just don’t know how far it soared out of my vehicle when we crashed.

My legs move,
taking tiny, shuffling steps around the BMW. I don’t want to, you know, trip over my
self
. That wouldn’t be weird at all.

“Damn
it.t kze="+0" Where are you?” I mumble, then drop to my hands and knees yet again. I’m not leaving until I know it’s here, in one piece.

“Seriously, Laney, what are you doing?”

If Flora thinks I’m going to just step aside, hoping and praying that my body is fine, then she’s got another thing coming.

Never mind about the hoping and praying, because
I feel a hand.
My
hand.

“It’s here!” I cry out, lifting my body off the ground.

Oh, God. I’m going to vomit. There’s no way. No freaking way.

M
y legs are broken, bending at odd angles. My face is marred from flying through the windshield, glass jutting out of my flawless skin. Blood is everywhere. Like, I can’t even describe how much there is; it soaks my clothes and my limbs and my face. I gulp down excess saliva.

Falling back
on my ass, I stare in disbelief. In a wobbly voice, I ask, “So, what do we do now?”

Flora’s
noisy sigh cuts through the air before she responds, “I don’t know.”

“Do you know anything?” I retort.

She glares at me from behind cold eyes. “Not according to you.”

“Well, that’s great. Just fantastic.” My voice is too high-pitched, not at all sounding like me.
Is this what shock feels like? Being stunned beyond certainty, feeling so numb that all you want to do is curl into a ball and stay that way forever? Because I want to do that right now.

“If you want to know the truth,
” Flora says, “I think we’re in purgatory. The in-between. The place all souls go to chill out.”

“That’s not funny
! I don’t want to be stuck here, and I can’t just leave my body all crooked and busted.”

Flora takes a cavernous breath through her nose, and then exhales it all out
, frustrated. Like
I’m
the one who doesn’t know what’s going on, or what she’s talking about. I’m sure she loves this place, all doom and gloom. It’s her personal heaven.

She’s pissed me off
for the last time—just like this place, this stupid shithole of a place. I’m screwed for the rest of my life. No more Chase. No more parties. Pageants are long gone, a soon-to-be vague memory of my old self. My
living
self.

Damn
it. If Flora’s right, then we’re ghosts. We’re only able to communicate with each other because the universe is unfair like that.

“They can’t
see us, can they? If we find a way back up there, nobody would know we’re present, even if we stood right in front of them,” I say. This is the craziest thing that’s ever happened to me. Stuff like this isn’t real. I’ve heard of out-of-body experiences, but that’s always in the operating room or ICU, not in car accidents, right?

And
definitely not with the person I crashed into.

“Look, I’m not going to stand here and listen to you complain about how you’
re dead. I’m in the same fucked-up position as you, and I’m not bitching. So, cool it, all right?”

I cross my arms
. “If we ever make it back to our world, you’d probably kill yourself just to come back here, freak.” I’m surprised she hasn’t hit me. It’s on its way, though.

“
Okay, that’s it. I’m not gonna wait around for you. You’re officially on your own,” she says, walking through the fog and toward the colorless trees.

“Fine,” I mumble, but soon realize that if she leaves, I have nobody—except maybe my
lifeless body, lying broken and twisted at my feet. My pride taking over, I mentally refuse to go after her. She’d love that; she’d see it as a win in her book.

H
er form is swallowed by the mist, and she disappears from my sight. My heart races, and my hands shake. Biting my lower lip, I close my eyes, in an attempt to find inner peace. I didn’t realize how quiet this place is. There are no sounds coming from elsewhere in the area, so it’s just us. Well, since Flora left, I guess it’s just me.

Ugh
. I hate doing this. I really, really do.

My eyelids snap open, and I yell,
“Flora, wait up! Don’t leave me here!” That totally sounds like I’m begging, maybe even whining, but I
swear
I’m not. Cross my heart, hope to die. Oh, wait…

Whatever.

Anyway.

“I have a proposition,” I tell her
, not knowing where the crazy weirdo disappeared to. She couldn’t have gone very far. “Look, I don’t want to be here anymore than you do, so I think we should stick together until we figure something out. You know, safety in numbers and all that.”

Whether she can hear me and is ignoring me, or she can hear me and is contemplating her response, I don’t know. What I
do
know is that if she doesn’t answer me soon, I’m going to have a minor panic attack. I don’t want to be in purgatory alone. What if another ghost decides they want to become BFF’s? Oh, my God. What if there are lurker ghosts? I had enough stalkers in Briarhaven. I don’t need them in the afterlife, too.

“Flora!” I scream as loudly as possible. My voice doesn’
t echo; the shadows consume

She stares at me, her eyes as
shaded as the world around us. “Let’s get one thing straight: if you want to tag along, you need to keep that big hole in your face shut for more than thirty seconds. Got it?”

I want nothing more than to claw her damn eyes out, but because I don’t want to be alone, I nod in agreement.
Ugh
. I can’t believe I just agreed to something the freak ordered me to do. It was a stupid thing to say on her part, but she’s stupid, so I’ll let it pass. If we somehow escape the Underworld, there will be hell to pay for Flora Mackey. Mark my words.

“So, w
here are we going?”

Turning on her heels, Flora
exclaims over her shoulder, “I’m going to find a way out.”

I
traipse through more fog and bushes, having no idea where I’m going. All I know is I want out of here. The farther away I am from my body, the weaker I become. It’s like trying to catch a breath after a long jog, or not eating for a lengthy period of time. I stagger, attempting to gain a footing, but slip and fall over.

Laney
collapses, too. “What’s happening?”

“I don’t know,” I say, gasping. “It’s like I’m paralyzed
. I can’t go any farther.”

We both lay on the charcoal-hued grass, abstaining from any more attempts to move.
If we can’t go farther than the area surrounding our bodies, I’m going to be pissed. What kind of afterlife is this, anyway? I thought purgatory was a place for souls to hang out, like a club scene for the dead—not a place where a person is stuck at the location of their demise.

But what if I’m wrong? What if there is a way to break free from the invisible
shackles weighing us down? Maybe we just have to push past whatever force this is to meet other spirits.

U
sing both arms, I reach out, digging my fingers into the ground and pulling my body forward. I only progress a few inches, but it’s enough to exhaust what little energy I have left. Okay, maybe my theory is wrong. Maybe this is the life (how ironic, that expression) Laney and I will have to settle for. It’ll just take a while—or possibly never—for me to get used to the idea of not seeing my family or Mia again. Will they ever find me? Will they ever learn what happened today? What if they think I disappeared? Maybe, in their minds, I just ran away. They knew my feelings towards Briarhaven, how I hated the town. How I wanted to escape and see the world.

“Hel
plt
lo
? Were you dropped on your head as a baby or something? I’m talking to you.” Laney’s annoying voice cuts through my reflection process.

Exhaling a rattled sigh, I ask, “What do you want?”

“I want to know what your genius plan will be,” she says. “Have you considered a way out of this place while you were in La-La Land over there?”

I sit up, slowly, and glare at her. “Actually, I was considering whether or not my family will ever find me. My body. Whatever.
” I can’t be certain, but there seems to be a faint glimmer of sadness in Laney’s eyes. As soon as it appears, however, it’s gone. “Have you wondered that, too, or were you just worried about how mangled your face looks?”

Laney rises rather quickly and pats her cheeks with both hands. “Oh, my God. Is it mangled now?”

Ignoring her, I stand and begin traipsing back toward the scene of the crash.

“We have to get back. We’re getting weaker,” I say.

“None of this makes any sense.”

“Wherever we are, whatever this place is”—I glance around, at the depressing, gray
, dreary world we’re stuck in—“it doesn’t want us to leave.”

My theory must be correct, because, as we near the crash site, I’m able to move about more quickly, and I don’t feel so light-headed anymore. The fog has dissipated some, but not enough that we can see our vehicles. The only way I remember the round
about locations of our cars is the cluster of trees growing near mine, and then straight back from there is Laney’s vehicle.

Lowering myself to the ground, I sit in the mist,
which persistently churns around me. Laney decides to sit, too. Even though we’re isolated from the real world, there are some similarities. Trees, grass, bushes, fog—all things found in our reality, yet they also exist here. What if we’re the only ones in this spot? Like, maybe we created our own parallel dimension when we died, so it’s just the two of us for the rest of eternity…

As I rid myself of bad thoughts, I realize
this location has its own distorted beauty. This would be Mia’s wet dream, living out the rest of time in a place where no color existed. She’d be so jealous of me right now.