Dead Men Scare Me Stupid (14 page)

“What could
work?” asked Fred.

I explained my
idea to the ghosts.

It had suddenly
occurred to me that if ghosts couldn’t be alive, the next best thing would be
if they could at least operate as if they were living people. Some of these new
gadgets might be able to help them do that.

The first thing
they needed was substance, of course. I’d been a ghost myself, so I knew what a
strong gust of wind could do.

One of the
inventions stacked up in the corner of the room was a suit designed to help
soldiers who had been blown to bits stay on the job and keep fighting for
Freedom, or against Freedom, depending on who the President was at the time. It
was an intricate exoskeleton suit that responded to the thoughts of the wearer.

I had a couple of
the ghosts try on the suits. They were dubious at first, but soon they were
prancing around like real humans, making all kinds of noise with their feet and
leaving footprints all over the place. Then they had an impromptu race to the
end of the hall. Then they fought. All the ghosts watching this got very
excited and clamored for suits of their own. Conklin, who was turning out to be
not such a bad sort, handed out the suits, while I looked over the other
inventions in the room.

There was a
gadget that kept your face in place and kept the features on that face from
drifting around. It was designed to help politicians keep a straight face when
they made campaign promises. Conklin said it was intended to be a gag, but
Washington had ordered 100,000 of them. A device like that would be handy for
ghosts too, I thought, so I had Conklin start handing out some of those. Then I
found some oversized artificial digestive tracts which had been invented so
government bigwigs could eat twenty times more than a normal human. Ghosts
would certainly be able to use a digestive tract, even if it was comically big.
So each ghost got one of those too.

Some of the
gadgets I found weren’t of any use to us, like the machine that made lies be
true, and the machine that would squeeze votes out of us and then blow our
heads off, but they were the exceptions. Most of the stuff would come in handy
in one way or another.

Since everybody
else was getting something, I felt I should get something too. So I grabbed one
of those machines that makes all the evil people in the world six inches tall.
With a machine like that, my job would be a snap. I turned it on to test it,
and Conklin and I both became really short. I turned the knob back to where it
was before, then put the machine back where I found it. I decided I didn’t want
it anymore.

When I had
successfully outfitted all the ghosts with everything they would need to rejoin
the land of the living, we happily exited and let Conklin get back to his
packing.

I always like to
end my exciting stories pretty much back where they started, so readers will
get the feeling that whatever happens in this crazy world of ours, old Frank
Burly will always be right back where he started. He’s not going anyplace. So I
guess I should stop here, and not move on to being hanged by those vigilantes
out West. That belongs in another adventure.

As this story
ends, everything has pretty much gotten back to normal in Central City. The
hallucinations have stopped, thanks to my intervention. Now when something bad
happens, it’s real.

And the town’s
ghost problem has been solved as well. The ghosts are still there, of course,
but they are all productive members of the community now. Instead of haunting
houses and slouching around town making everybody nervous, they are hard at
work every day serving up hamburgers at fast food joints, guarding warehouses
at night, filling up gumball machines, and doing other low profile, but
necessary, productive, and satisfying jobs. Thanks to their special survival
gear, they can stay substantial for a full eight hour shift. And after working
all day, they’re too tired to do any haunting, even if they wanted to. Just eat
some dinner, watch some ghost stories on TV, then hit the sack.

That’s not to say
that the ghosts are actually good at these jobs they’re doing. Even with their
special equipment they’re still slow and clumsy and tend to drop things a lot.
So if you’ve noticed that the service you’re getting these days isn’t as good
as it used to be, or the products you buy look like they were put together by
someone wearing a catcher’s mitt, or the people who are supposed to be helping
you suddenly just disappear and never come back, now you know why.

The whole
Clarence machine thing eventually came out in the papers. You can’t stop people
from finding out about things. At least not since I wrecked that machine.

When the story first
broke, a lot of people were angry. There were calls for investigations, demands
for resignations, and so on. All the usual stuff. But pretty soon the public’s
tone changed to one of admiration. Pretty slick cover-up work, a lot of people
thought. That’s the kind of people we want representing us. Sneaky little shits
like that. Why didn’t they tell us they were sneaky little shits instead of
pretending to be self-promoting idiots?

Now the word is
that the old sneaky regime might be swept back into power in the next election,
despite its obvious flaws. The public wants to get some of that shitty
sneakiness working for them.

So things worked
out pretty well for just about everybody. I’m still not born, and I’m still
regularly struck by lightning, and women I ask out say I smell dead to them,
but you can’t have everything.

I saw Ed and Fred
one last time. They had really landed on their feet. Instead of working at some
crappy low-wage job like the other ghosts, they had opened up a detective
agency on the floor below mine, and were cleaning up on cases where the client
didn’t want to ride the elevator up the last eight feet just to get to me. I
congratulated them on their success, and they said they owed it all to me. And
I said I guessed that was about right.

As a parting
gesture, they told me who the real murderer was in that case I told you about
earlier – the one where I rented the stadium. In fact, they brought him into my
office, looking a little shamefaced. He was a ghost now too. Ironically, I had
gotten him killed when I was messing around with the Clarence machine. Thanks
to me, he had gotten beaten to death by Jack Dempsey in a title fight he knew
nothing about. There’s some justice there somewhere, I suppose.

When he admitted
his guilt to me, I couldn’t believe it.

“But you had an
ironclad alibi!” I said.

“Maybe so, but I
still did it.”

“Well, I’ll be a
son of a gun! Did you really shoot all those men on that troopship I was
guarding?”

“I sure did!”

And we all had to
laugh.

When Ed and Fred
left, I waved goodbye to them, and I even blew them a little kiss. It was nice
of the boys to solve my murder for me, but I still think they’re a couple of
pricks.

THE TIME MACHINE
DID IT (2004)

DOUBLE WONDERFUL
(2005)

HOW I CONQUERED
YOUR PLANET (2006)

THE EXPLODING
DETECTIVE (2007)

DEAD MEN SCARE ME
STUPID (2008)

EARTH VS.
EVERYBODY (2009)

THE LAST
DETECTIVE ALIVE (2010)

THE FIFTY FOOT
DETECTIVE (2011)

Copyright
© 2008

by John
Swartzwelder

Published
by:

Kennydale Books

P.O. Box 3925

Chatsworth,
California 91313-3925

All Rights
Reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or
by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by
any information storage and retrieval system, without written permission from
the author, except for the inclusion of brief quotations in a review.

First Printing
April, 2008

ISBN 13
(paperback edition) 978-0-9755799-8-5

ISBN 13 (hardback
edition) 978-0-9755799-9-2

ISBN 10
(paperback edition) 0-9755799-8-3

ISBN 10 (hardback
edition) 0-9755799-9-1

Library of
Congress Control Number: 2008901007

This book is a
work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are the product
of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to
actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

Printed in the
United States of America

DEAD
MEN SCARE ME STUPID

John Swartzwelder

Kennydale Books.

Chatsworth,
California