Nearafter (D.E.A.T.H. bk. 1)

Chapter Three [Ethan]

Sirens blared as police cruisers, ambulances and fire trucks shot past them in the opposite direction. A few moments later, news vans from stations all around the city sped after.

Clara did not pay any of the commotion on the street any mind. Ethan stopped and stared after the ever-growing line of speeding vehicles, with a strange feeling roiling in his ghost gut. He knew exactly where they all were headed. Somewhere, several blocks back, was his body, still reclining in a crater in the middle of the street, eyes wide open, hole in the chest. Dead.

For some reason Ethan strongly wanted to go back, needed to go back to his body. He felt out of place. Homesick. Though it was more than a feeling. It was an urge, an impulse. He even started to walk back the way they had come, but Clara snatched his hand and yanked him along with her. She mumbled incoherent things under her breath as she guided Ethan through the late-night crowd of pedestrians on the busy boulevard.

She did not look so happy about walking Ethan. He must have seemed like an absent-minded child to her, a newborn pup that someone had just dumped onto her hands. He was lost in a distant daze, just drifting alongside Clara like the ghost that he now was.

A ghost... he thought. Dead. Gone. No more. The reality of his situation had finally started to sink in. He no longer existed in the world. Ethan Grady was no longer alive.

An endless procession of gradually slowing vehicles whizzed by. Traffic was slowing along the main road, and Ethan knew why. His body, his unusual death was very quickly becoming a spectacle. Somewhere way back there, Ethan figured, the paramedics would be arriving on the scene. But they would not be able to help him, would realize that when they saw him. They would throw a blanket over his cold, dead corpse, stuff him into a bag, strap him to a gurney, and ship Ethan Grady off to the coroners.

They would conduct an autopsy, try to figure out who Ethan was, how he had died. That much would be obvious, but still they would cut him open; run an electric bone saw down his sternum (or what was left of it anyway) and peel back his rib cage, like some kind of shellfish. His parents would have to come identify him, except that Ethan did not have parents. Not anymore. No one, that is except for a ten-year-old stepbrother who had been adopted when they both were in foster care. He barely knew Nolan....

Ethan had become so lost in his own mind that he did not notice that they had stopped. He looked around and found it odd that they were standing at the crosswalk, with all the living people. If his mind was not so far away, he probably would have wondered why.

Clara still had a firm grip on his hand. She still looked very unhappy about the whole arrangement. But Ethan did not care. He was running through questions quicker than his mind could answer them. What now? Where are we going? Is there a God? Did I piss him off? Is it too late to believe in something...?

Clara must have witnessed the struggle on his face because she loosened her grip on his hand and her expression softened when she looked his way.

"Relax," she said.

But how...? he wondered. All around him were people, people whom he clearly saw, but whom clearly could not see him. Standing next to him was a girl, about his age, a sophomore in high school. Maybe they even went to the same school together. He watched her without blinking. She seemed like the type of girl that would have been ignorant of Ethan's existence, even when he was alive. She must have been talking a thousand miles per minute on her cell phone, when Ethan reached out to touch her. His fingers passed through her shoulder, and suddenly the girl stopped talking. For a moment the look in her eyes was cloudy and faraway, then she shivered. Mistaking Ethan's ghost touch for a freak, evening chill, the girl rubbed her shoulder gently, and then shook the entire feeling away before continuing her conversation.