Unfinished Business

CHAPTER 21: NOT THE END

As it turned out, what lay beyond the flickering dark was the same as ever. It was the afterlife DMV once again, with its long lines and fluorescent lights and dinky plastic chairs.

Still unsure about what the exact protocols of the afterlife DMV were, I went with my gut instinct. I snatched a number from the dispenser and took a seat in a plastic chair, knowing I looked a mess. At least I wasn't as messy as some people here. Some people here died in really gruesome or really weird ways. One guy looked like he had been swimming, thanks to his get-up, which included blue-and-white-striped swim trunks with a pattern of flamingos throughout, purple-lensed goggles over his eyes, a snorkel that seemed to be inexplicably full of water, the absolutely ridiculous sunburn all over his body. It seemed possible to me that he drowned while on a little outing. Why he was swimming in the fall, I didn't know. He seemed to be a new arrival. Maybe he was from a more temperate region than the one I was used to.

I tried to make a game of guessing at how other people died. I counted at least fifteen shootings in my immediate area. Plus thirteen who came in together while I was waiting. That, in particular, turned my stomach. They seemed to be my age. I knew, I suspected what had happened there. Another school shooting in some undisclosed school in some undisclosed town or city in America, who died before they got the chance to live their lives. I couldn't stop looking at them until I forced myself to look away.

There were other kinds of deaths. A woman in a pink checkerboard-patterned waitress uniform and a stab wound entering at her back and exiting between her front third and fourth ribs sat a few chairs away from a young man with a huge dent in his skull, severe road rash, and a pretty much broken motorcycle helmet on his lap. 

There were only a few people whose deaths I couldn't place or understand. Two people, in particular, stood out. One was torn to pieces, with long strips of skin missing all over her body. The other was in a similar state of disarray, but more slashed than peeled. One of her eyes kept popping out, but it was there. At least she seemed to be adjusting well. At least she wasn't freaking out all over the place. At least she wasn't moping in her chair and trying to avoid eye contact like someone we all knew. 

The eye fell out again, and the girl in the Playboy-style sexy duck costume, like an undead spoof on Elle Woods, popped the eye back into her head and sighed; she looked up at the lights over her head, seemingly bewildered by the fact that it wasn't burning her retinas. That was when it hit me. This girl-- I had seen her before. I spotted her at the party, dancing with some boy while Willa was storming off into the house proper. I fell over her body in the woods. This was Claire Tonks, the most recent victim of the Eye For An Eye. Or, rather, the most recent victim that I knew of. Someone else could have died. Someone else could have been hunted right at that moment. Who was to say that the Eye For An Eye wasn't robbing some poor other teenager of their opportunity to live, to grow up, to move away from home and become their own person?

My number came up. I looked away and walked to the counter.I didn't really pay attention to the woman behind the counter. She was no Miss Argentina. In fact, she was remarkably plain, in a t-shirt and jeans sort of way. I didn't even know her name. There was nothing that would have told it to me. There was no plaque, no nametag, just an empty space where a name should have been.

"What brings you here?" she asked, voice tired. "Haunting license renewal? New arrival?"

"Uh-- no. I'm neither. I'm in the middle of killing the monster that killed me, and I think it knocked me back here.

She sighed and put her fingers on her keyboard. "Name?"

"Eve Hardy."

"Middle."