“You realize this is crazy,” I told Shannon.
She shook her head. “No, crazy is not doing anything at all and letting ourselves become one of those mindless ghosts.”
Our destination, the upscale housing development known as Hilltop, loomed over the town—still over a mile away. The one or two times a car passed us by, it didn’t slow or stop long enough for us to climb aboard. We settled into a quick mall-walker’s pace. Each of our steps made no sound. A raccoon rummaging through a recycle bin hissed in our general direction.
A silver Cutlass Supreme swerved around the corner. It veered into someone’s yard, spraying bits of grass through the air and us. I winced as the tiny blades soared through me. After the car lurched back onto the road, the driver tossed a beer bottle onto the asphalt. Glass exploded. One shard sliced through my shin, and I spilled to the ground.
“Ow. Drunk asshole.”
“What a dick,” Shannon said. “You okay?”
“I’m fine,” I said, rubbing the wound.
Beer cans, cigarette butts, fast food trash, plastic bottles, and other litter marred the surrounding landscape. I shook my head at the wastefulness of it all. The disrespect.
“We just use shit and throw it away,” I told Shannon. “Look at the fucking mess we’ve made of everything. Polluting rivers. Staining the air. Littering.”
She stared up at the Light. “We’re even leaving our old space junk out among the stars. We learned about it in science class. There’s a whole bunch of old satellites and shit orbiting around the planet.”
“Yeah, my ex had a whole rant about that very topic,” I said. “Maybe all those souls back there are the same thing—just more litter that we’ve used and tossed aside. Maybe the Earth has become a trash heap for junked spirits.”
She sighed impatiently. “We need to go. Tara’s dad leaves for work sometime before four a.m. It has to be almost three now.”
I remembered something the funeral home ghost had said. And then the clock strikes three. And I have to hide.
A shiver passed through me. Suddenly our plan seemed so foolish. So improbable. I shook my head.
She knelt beside me. “Look, no matter where we’ve gone all day, the Light has somehow been directly above us, right? Even when we’re apart, right?”
I nodded.
“So it follows that if we ride an airplane up into the sky, the Light will stay above us, and we can blast through that fucking crowd of ghosts and get into the Light, right?”
“Isn’t that like cutting to the front of the line, though?”
She flailed her arms. “So fucking what? Would you rather become a goddamn mindless drone?”
I thought about the old woman cackling as her dead husband tickled her. About Jonathan Heck torn to bits by water and light. About fucking George and his stupid stories and his sculpted butt cheeks.
Earlier, when Shannon had first told me her plan to hitch a plane into the Light, it’d seemed like madness. The closest airport, Dayton International Airport, was miles and miles away. No way could we get there by dawn.
Except then Shannon had said, “Tara’s dad manages a warehouse out by the airport. He has to leave super early. We could hitch a ride in the back of his pickup. That’d get us to the airport before dawn, right?”
I’d nodded reluctantly. “Yeah, but how far away is Tara’s?”
“In my neighborhood on the other side of town. At Hilltop.”
“Really?”
“What? Because Tara dresses all Hot Topic, she can’t live on the nicer side of town? Have you shopped at Hot Topic? Do you know how overpriced they are?”
I’d shrugged. “In my day, if we wanted to dress alternative, we just went to the thrift store.”
“Yeah, well your day was a long, long time ago.”
Now, I stared up at Hilltop.
From down here, the McMansion houses looked like pale tombstones. It seemed even more unattainable in death than it did in life.
“I used to play there when I was little,” I told her. “The hill was all forest then and we pretended we were Ewoks from Return of the Jedi. Later when construction started, we used to have keg parties in the foundations of the homes.”
“Sounds pretty cool.”
“I guess. But when I look back on those days, it’s like there were two versions of me experiencing everything. There was the young woman that I pretended to be—all about having fun and making the most out of life—and then there was a very scared little girl who was using that young woman to keep the shadys away.”
“The shadys?”
“That’s what my dad used to call them—the shadys. Those dark thoughts and feelings that sometimes seem to circle my brain like wolves, ready to pounce at any sign of weakness. One of the last conversations I had with him, I was sad because I was having troubles with friends at school. He told me that the shadys never stop coming. He said that you can feed them darkness and make them stronger, or you can fill your head with light and watch them run away.”
“What happened to him? Your dad?”
“He died of a heart attack when I was seven.”
“I’m sorry.”
“He’d taken me up to the playground to play our favorite game—monster tag. It was basically regular tag, except whoever was ‘it’ had to pretend to be a monster.”
“Cool,” she said.
“It was overcast and drizzling—a hot, humid summer day. We had the playground to ourselves. He was wearing one of his white V-neck shirts. I was playing as a zombie, hissing and moaning and chasing him up the slide when he fell, clutching his chest. While my father breathed his last breaths, I kneeled over him pretending to eat his brain.”
“Oh gawd,” she said.
“Dad didn’t respond, even when I licked my fingertip and wiggled it in his ear. I got up and ran away, expecting at any moment for him to follow.
“He didn’t. I hid behind a bench, watching and waiting for him to leap up as a snarling werewolf or stand up as a cruel vampire.
“He didn’t. The drizzle blossomed into rain, hammering down on us both and plastering my dress to my body. I walked over to him. His shirt was soaked. His eyes stared upward. I expected him to blink.
“He didn’t.”
She clearly didn’t know how to respond to that. I didn’t know why I’d shared it. Only a few people knew that story. I guess when you died together—when you shared your last breaths—then you could share almost anything.
In many ways, I’d been pretending to be a zombie for the past few years. I hadn’t had any real meaningful connections with anyone. I’d been walking through life, seemingly animated but dead inside.
I held out my hand. “Please help me up.”
She grabbed my arm, and a little tingle ran up my phantom spine. Gold specks flashed in our auras. The pain in my shin simmered to a dull throb. Once on my feet, I did a few leg swings and settled into a walking lunge, stretching out the injured limb. This was my pre-run routine.
“I used to run cross country back in middle school,” I told her. “It’s the only sport I ever loved. It felt so good just to run, run, run. I was pretty damn fast, too. But I ditched it by the time I got to high school.”
“I do the 100-meter and 200-meter dash. And the high jump.”
“Cool.”
“What got you started running again?” she said.
“How’d you know I started back?”
“It’s a small town. I’ve seen you running around in the early morning and at night.”
This gave me pause, the idea that she’d seen me. Noticed me. Ever since I’d returned to Davis after the divorce, I’d felt like nothing but a ghost in this town. “Yup. That’s when I like to run. I’ve got a course around town. Depending on the time of day, I go clockwise or counter-clockwise so that I can time it so that I’m running away from the sunset or the sunrise.”
“Why?”
I shrugged. “I like to chase my shadow when it’s all stretched out like that. Also, I’m fair skinned. I burn easy.”
“You never answered my question. Why’d you start running again?”
“I don’t know. Maybe I was trying to run away from my wrecked marriage and the fact that I was living with my mom. Maybe I was just trying to find myself. Maybe I just needed to get out of my skull for a while. Running’s cheaper than booze. And less complicated than sex.”
“Let’s do it together,” she said.
I stopped short, almost tripping over my feet. Was she propositioning me for sex? Anticipation swelled in my chest. What would I say? Yes or no? Before I could decide, she bent over and stretched her legs, too. Ah. She only wanted to run—not fuck. I bit my lip, surprised by my own disappointment.
Turned out, Shannon and I kept pretty steady pace with each other. Up until now, I’d only sprinted as a ghost. I’d never had to sustain a run. Gone were the familiar rhythms of inhaling and exhaling, and the steady hammering of bodyweight on my kneecaps. It took a long time to settle into a new groove without these cues. Ghost-running was more like flowing as a river. Except where water relied on gravity for momentum, I had to supply that force through sheer will. The asphalt blurred below my bare feet. I wished I had sneakers, but it didn’t really matter so long as I clutched my lone shoe in my hand to keep it from slipping onto my foot.
I sideways-glanced at the girl a few times. Amidst the whirring of her limbs, her face had frozen as hard as ice. Her eyes narrowed. Her jaw clenched. She wasn’t running toward Hilltop. No, this girl was running away from something.
At the entrance of Hilltop Acres, two rectangular brick walls flanked either side of the wide street. Unlike the cracked and broken roads in the middle of Davis, the asphalt here was as smooth as buttered toast. The neighborhood looked like a damn banshee block party, with spirits of all shapes and sizes mingling on streets, porches, and driveways.
Shannon and I exchanged looks and panted. I tried not to stare at her eyes, which were blacker than they were only an hour ago.
She must’ve been seeing the same thing. “Your pupils are ginormous,” she said. “I can barely see any white left.”
“Great.”
We worked our way through the crowd of grinning idiots and down the street. Hilltop was one of those neighborhoods where all the houses looked vaguely the same and all the lawns were neatly manicured. The avenues formed a labyrinth of turns and dead-ends, and they all had nature names like Bluebird Drive or Oak Nest Road in honor of the tiny ecosystem that was destroyed to make room for all of this. I didn’t bother paying attention to how many turns we made.
As we crossed an intersection, the church bell down in town chimed.
Clong.
I paused to look at her. “Were you coming from track practice when you . . . when we died?”
“No.”
Clong.
“Then why were you wearing your track uniform?”
“I wasn’t. But for some reason I’m wearing it now. Maybe sometimes ghosts wear what they die in or get buried in, and other times they wear what was most important to them.”
“I guess.”
Clong.
At the sound of the last chime, all the ghosts stopped talking. For a moment, they stood or sat in place as still as statues. Shannon and I exchanged wide-eyed glances. As if on cue, all the spirits dropped to the ground and convulsed like fish out of water. The closest ghost was an older man that used to bag groceries at the local IGA. His arms and legs went rigid while his torso bucked back and forth. He arched his back and his mouth opened impossibly wide, as if to puke. Except what came out was darkness—the same wiggling black that had consumed all their eyes, but now it poured out of him and over his face and down his chin. It erupted out of his navel, eclipsed his hips, and dripped down to his toes.
This happened to the entire neighborhood of ghosts. The darkness consumed them entirely, even their clothes until they rose on wobbly legs like newborn fawns. A crowd of impossibly black figures now stood all around us. Every single one of them turned to face our direction. They swayed ever so slightly like trees in a breeze.
For a moment, time froze.
Terror gripped me. I couldn’t move.
Shannon grabbed my hand, which jarred me out of my paralysis. Yet we had nowhere to go. We were completely surrounded.