Body Grabber

Body Grabber

by Jon Thompson

I’m dead.

Carl hovered above the wet street staring down at...himself.

“Would you like to go back?” a hollow voice asked.

“Of course I want to go back.”

Three feet away, pinpoints of light began glowing, as if someone had cut a circle of stars out of the night sky and hung it from the lamp post. The random lights began to move and coalesced into a human figure – of sorts. It was at least eight feet tall, and formed like a man, but ethereal. The edges wavered and shimmered like an image projected onto a mist, and Carl could see through it.

“I can help you go back.”

“Who are you?”

“Does it make any difference? The only thing that matters is, do you want to go back?”

Carl looked down on his lifeless body lying rain-soaked on the cement below. He thought about Linda, his girlfriend, and Vince, his best friend. They would miss him. Truthfully, they’d probably be the only ones who’d miss him.

He thought about all the places he wanted to travel, but had never been. All of the things he wanted to do before he died, that he hadn’t gotten around to doing. He always told himself they could wait until he was old. But here he was, dead, at seventeen, and he hadn’t done a tenth of the things he wanted to do before he died.

If he’d known he was going to be dead by now, he would have done the jewelry store heist. Six hundred thousand and change in gems could buy a bunch of good times. He could have gone to the Bahamas. Spent oodles of money, and still had more for places like Mexico where they grew the finest weed, and Puerto Rico where he could get just about anything he wanted in the way of girls, booze, and drugs.

Linda would have wanted to go along. And he would have taken her, at least until he found somebody else. She was fun and all, but he was sure he could have found a better trophy lying on one of those sunny beaches. After all, the best fruit grows in the sun. And here in Portland there wasn’t much sun. But Linda was what he had, all he’d had for the last two years, so, as they say, “You take what you can get.”

“Well?” the apparition asked.

“I’m thinking.”

“This is a limited time offer.”

Carl stared down at his body. It lay face down on the sidewalk. He looked up and down the street, there was nobody in sight. He was alone. He couldn’t remember where he was, how he got here, or why he was dead.

Do I want to go back?

The problem in being alive would be Ramirez. He held Carl’s marker for five thousand dollars. If Carl were dead, he couldn’t pay. But alive, Ramirez would be after him. Still, knowing what dead was like, that his time was already up once, he could do the jewelry store heist quick and easy.

What Do I have to lose? After all, I’m already dead. It’s not so bad. A big score, pay off Ramirez, and head for sunshine, warm beaches and hot women.

“I need an answer. Do you want to go back?”

Of course he wanted to go back, but...

Something nagged at him about the scene at his feet. The rain. Him lying face down on the sidewalk. A rhythmic strobe of lights. The fact that nobody had found him. But that was good. If nobody knew what happened, then he wouldn’t have to silence anybody who might rat him out about him coming back from the dead.

How did I end up dead on the sidewalk?

He tried to remember the last few moments of his life. What happened to me? But there was nothing, no memory of how he died. He remembered getting up this morning...or was it this morning? Each day seemed to be the same as every other day. Indistinguishable. His whole life flowed into a single memory. He remembered people and events, but the chronology was jumbled. As if time no longer had meaning.

The kids at the group home where he volunteered regularly would say his coming back was a miracle. The counselors at the home were big on teaching the Bible and the story about Lazarus, “As a metaphor for how each of us can change, if we only have the chance and the right motivation.”

Yeah those kids would see him coming back as “a miracle.” Maybe on his way out of town he could stop by and tell them the story about his resurrection, and donate a few thousand to the home at the same time. He’d be a hero; maybe even they’d make him a saint.

“Okay, I want to go back.”

“Very well. There is just the matter of a few details.”

“Such as?”

“This.” The apparition held up a leather-bound book with Carl’s name on the cover.

“What’s that?”

“This is your Book of Life. It contains the balance that determines where you will spend eternity. Most of it is in order, but there is a small matter, nothing really, about your work at a group home.”

Carl wondered if the book told about the time he stole a couple of hundred from the home, then let three of the boys staying there take the fall for it. Those poor kids had to work like dogs for weeks to pay for that, and nobody ever suspected he really stole it.

“I will need your okay, here, that you are willing have certain incidents stricken from your evaluation. Then I can send you back into life.”

Was it really so easy to erase such a bad deed? Just the stroke of a pen and God overlooks the theft, even though it caused so much damage to so many? This sounds like a better deal every step of the way.

“Sure, I’ll sign.”

The apparition opened the book to pages about the group home. There were images, not like pictures in a book, but more like memories captured in a video. He didn’t see himself taking the money, what he saw instead were images of times when he had talked some of the kids out of doing stupid things like stealing, escaping, roughing up one of the other kids. Stuff he thought that if somebody had told him when he was that age, maybe his life would have turned out different, better.

The images brought back memories of how his mom cried the first few times she had to drive down to the police precinct to bail him out of juvenile detention, and later, jail. How she wept when she visited him in prison, and how she told him she couldn’t stand seeing her boy behind bars anymore. She never came back. He heard she died, but he was in the joint, so he couldn’t attend her funeral.

He thought that if he could steer some of those kids away from making the same kind of mistakes he’d made, they wouldn’t have to deal with that kind of pain.

“Your signature?”

The voice brought Carl back to the present. At least he thought it was the present. He felt like he was still in Portland. That made sense. He could see his body lying on the sidewalk, and the rain, but he wasn’t really, there. The rain was all around him, but he didn’t get wet. He wasn’t cold either. He wasn’t anything. He just, was.

“I need your signature before you can go back.”

A thick black pen appeared in Carl’s hand, and the apparition guided his hand toward the page where a signature line appeared just under where the pen point rested. “Sign here.”

Carl couldn’t actually feel the pen, but he signed his name in red on the line. As soon as he signed his name, the images of his work with the kids in the group home faded and vanished from the page. The pages were blank.

“Very good. Now, get ready to go back into your body. Brace yourself, it may sting a bit.”

Carl braced himself. He didn’t know why, but the apparition said “Brace yourself,” so he did, or at least he tried, though he discovered he had no idea how without his body.

The jolt of waking up in his body reminded him of the time he sped off in a stolen Chevy Malibu and missed the turn at the end of Multnomah Drive. The car slammed into the concrete bridge abutment. He went from forty miles an hour to a dead stop that almost threw him out of the car. It probably would have, except he was wearing the lap and shoulder belts, but it still felt like his bones were going to rip right out through his skin.

Then he could hear the rain, and feel the cold wetness of his rain soaked clothes against his skin, and the wet hardness of the concrete under him. Then the pain hit. His chest hurt like somebody had driven a hot fireplace poker through it.

Carl opened his eyes and all he could see was a blindingly bright light and the outline of a gun laying on the sidewalk inches from his hand. He tried to get up, but it hurt too much to move. He reached out to take the gun. Wherever he was, he was probably going to need it; after all, somebody had killed him once.

“Don’t move.” A voice yelled from the darkness behind the light.

Carl’s memory flooded back. He hit the jewelry store, and it went bad. The security guard. The job was going smoothly until that stupid guard decided to be a hero. Carl shot him three times, but not until the guard got off one shot. It hit Carl in the shoulder. He ran. Out into the street. He had left the car running and drove away. But he had to get the bullet wound taken care of, so he came down to the docks. He knew a guy who fixed up injured fishermen who didn’t want to go see a real doc.

The guy got the bullet out, and Carl rested for a few hours. But when he felt like he could travel, he went out to the car.

The cops were there. He tried to pull his gun, but the wound in his shoulder made it hard to move and he was slow. He got the gun halfway out of his pants when a cop shot him in the chest. Killed him!

Hands roughly forced his arms behind his back and cold steel handcuffs snapped on his wrists. Somebody turned him over and he looked up into the faces of two uniformed cops, both had their guns out and pointed at him. As they rolled him over pain blasted through his chest and down both legs and arms.

“That’s the guy from the holdup,” one of the cops said.

 “Help me,” Carl gasped, and the pain intensified when he spoke.

“He’s still alive. Call the EMT’s.”

“Look at all that blood. I’ll call, but he won’t live long enough for it to get here.”

No, this can’t be right. Carl’s mind screamed, but no sound came out of his mouth. The pain in his chest stopped, but his whole body felt like he had been dunked in hot lava, and then he hovered over his body again.

“Welcome back.” The apparition stood in front of Carl. “Did you enjoy your return to life?”

“What? You tricked me. You sent me back just so I could die again?”

“I merely made a bargain with you, to send you back. What you did with your time is entirely your own responsibility.”

“Now what happens to me?”

“Why, you come to hell, of course.”

“Hell, wait a minute, don’t I get a trial, haven’t I done anything in my life to get out of going to hell?”

“Not any more, you signed away the only good things you ever did. Welcome to my world.”

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