I DECIDED IT was time to die again.
Or at least to make it look that way.
Encouraged by the return of my mental recording mechanism, I was pretty confident that more of my internal powers would eventually come back. I might be able to rearrange the matter inside my own body because it was in such close proximity to my brain.
I wouldn’t have to strain myself too much. I just needed to do enough organ manipulation to pull off a quick (and convincing) heart rate reduction.
On planets across the cosmos, the bigger the creature, the slower its resting heart rate. Great whales, the largest animals on Earth, operate on about seven beats per minute. The average heart rate for a sixteen-year-old earthling boy? Between 143 and 173 beats per minute. This is probably why those guys can’t sit still for very long.
Anyway, on Sreym, a planet I visited once, I met this HUGE under-ice dweller called a freejinn. It’s the size of Rhode Island and lives in the darkness six miles beneath the glaciers that coat Sreym’s polar ice caps. Its heart rate? Two beats every hour, like clockwork.
And the freejinn taught me how to do it.
I took a deep breath and concentrated hard. In my mind, I became a freejinn at the bottom of the Sreym sea.
I could still see and hear everything in the room, including the long, piercing screech of the EKG machine as my pulse dropped off the charts.
“Code Blue!” I heard a robotic voice call out from a ceiling speaker. “Code Blue!”
The two burly orderlies bustled into the room. Nurse O’Hara stormed in right behind them.
“What’s going on?” she demanded.
“He’s flatlining!” grunted one of the orderlies. When he spoke, a long, rubbery lizard tongue spooled out of his mouth. As I suspected, my orderlies were actually undercover aliens in cheap human suits.
Nurse O’Hara grabbed my wrist as the EKG machine continued screaming its annoying beeeeeeeeeeep.
“No pulse,” she reported.
Well, that wasn’t entirely true. My heart had already done its freejinnian ba-boom-boom for the hour. It’d be back with another drum solo in about sixty minutes.
“The Prayer must have his prey! We must resuscitate the boy!”
Note to self: it’s pretty impossible to say all the “s” sounds in the word “resuscitate” when you’re wearing a rubbery mask to make you look like a sweet Irish nurse.
My alien caregivers were so busy—frantically hauling me out of the hospital bed, sliding me onto a gurney—that they didn’t seem to notice that their lip, nose, and eyeholes were sliding around to reveal blotchy patches of their true snot-yellow and puke-green skin.
“The Alien Hunter must not die!” cried Nurse O’Hara as the orderlies rolled me up the hall.
“Yes, Mistress,” grunted the two orderlies. Slobbery gobs of gelatinous fish-gut goop dribbled out of their nose holes.
“Take him to the resuscitation chamber.”
“Yes, Mistress.”
In my self-induced state of suspended animation, I could still see and hear everything as they rolled me out the door.
The hospital corridors looked like the backstage of a movie set. The walls of my room had been made out of painted canvas stretched across wooden frames.
Without moving my eyeballs (dead guys don’t do eye rolls), I activated my zoom vision and peered over my toes.
To the double door we were about to bang through.
When the foot of my gurney hit the exit bar, I smelled something decidedly delicious: fresh air.
The resuscitation chamber must be in some other building.
For the next couple of minutes, I’d be outside the prison walls.