“That, looks a lot like a doorway to the afterlife,” David said, shifting his weight a bit from side to side on the black tile floor.
“Glowing gold doors.”
“Yeap.”
“Sort of on the nose, isn’t it?” she asked.
“Kinda has to be, right? We’re dead, and no one’s showed up to show us what to do?” He gestured to the doors. “So, I mean, looks like we can go through the doors and go to wherever we’re supposed to go after we die. And it wouldn’t be a mistake. Has to be a decision.”
“But it’s blocking our way out.”
He stepped closer to the glowing doors. “Eh, we can go around. Seems like the right and left door don’t go into the light. ”
“Into the light…” She shivered and rubbed her arms. “Maybe some of those out-of-body experiences people have were actually true?”
“Yeah, maybe.” He stepped back from the doors, and looked at her with serious eyes. David usually had a soft expression, until his brain went into think mode. Then it got serious. “Okay, we’re running through this kinda fast. We’ve been dead twenty minutes. Let’s just, stop for a second, and think.”
“Yeah.”
“We have no idea how we died.”
“True.”
“Genetic condition?” he asked.
“I don’t know about any genetic condition that would kill us at the same time.”
“Yeah, me neither. And… and I kinda wanna stick around until we find out what happened.”
She raised a brow. “No one’s gonna check on us until they smell us rotting. You want to stick around long enough to see that?”
“No, but… maybe the killer will return?”
“Assuming the killer’s a dumbass. Assuming we were murdered.”
“Something happened! Something weird. Something very weird.” He looked past her to the doors, frowned, and went back to their dorm room. She followed. She knew she could rely on David to come to a conclusion about something, a smart conclusion, a logical one, once he’d gotten past the initial shock of everything. Dude was always like that, deer in headlights at first, but reliable once he got things to click.
Could he get this to click? The whole being dead thing? Well, it was better than a bunch of screaming and panicking and crying about things lost; they just did that in the shower room, anyway.
“Scene of the crime,” he said as he phased through their door, her behind him. Their bodies were still there, unchanged. “I’m… dead, definitely. If there was any chance I was alive, drowning in my cereal milk finished me off.”
That, was too fucking funny, and she snorted on a chuckle, earning a harsh glare from her brother. She coughed, and stood opposite of him around the small table.
“I’m… definitely dead,” she said, and she forced herself to lean in close and look her body straight in the eyes. Holy fuck that was chilling. “There’s nothing going on in there. She’s not breathing.”
“So we both just… went through a shit load of pain, at the exact same time, for… what, ten seconds? Could barely move. Every limb felt like it was burning off. And then we just died.” David gestured down at the two bodies. “That isn’t normal!”
“So you want to stick around to find out what happened.”
“Yes. Because… there’s just no fucking way this happened. It couldn’t have happened. It’s not possible.”
“Unless?”
David groaned as he walked into the living room, and tried to sit down on the couch. And went through it onto the floor. She snorted on a chuckle again and managed a small smile for him and his head, the only part of him visible, sticking up from the couch cushion.
“Unless what?” he said. “There’s no medical explanation for this, and no criminal one. Like we said, maybe poison, but you started eating before I did. Even if it was poison, we died in seconds, in the exact same way. Poison doesn’t work like that.”
She raised a hand. “Allergic–”
“Nope.”
“Poison in the air?”
“Not a chance.”
“Then…”
He shrugged, shoulders popping up through the couch momentarily. “I don’t know. So all we can do, is sit here, and wait.”
“Wait here, and ignore the stairway to Heaven?”
“Assuming that’s where it’s taking us.”
“Oh come on! Those doors were practically radiating angelic… ness.” She joined him and sat beside him. Two heads, sticking up out of the couch cushions. “We’re not going to Hell.”
“Might not be Heaven or Hell. Could be some other astral plane of… existence.”
“What Dreams May Come sorta deal?”
And for the first time that night, David smiled. A real smile.
“That would be pretty nice. Crafting our own personal Heavens, sharing them with other souls.”
“Right?” She returned his smile, peeked past him back at their bodies, squeezed her eyes shut for a second to try and wipe the memory of her corpse away, and looked back to her brother. “We know what your personal Heaven would be like. Bunch of barely legal busty chicks lying around waiting to get railed by… well I assume you’ll be a giant minotaur or something, with a two-foot-long dick.”
“Maybe not two feet.”
She laughed. “But everything else–”
“Oh definitely.” He grinned at her. “But let me guess. You’d want a bunch of giant sexy buff dudes, or giant sexy buff monsters, fighting each other for the right to pin you down and fuck you, despite your girly little mewls. ‘Oh no, please, don’t, oh please don’t I’m small and frail and you’re so big oh please don’t hurt me mister big bad giant monster with two dicks and a perfect body’.”
Damn it, she couldn’t help but laugh.
“What’s wrong with that fantasy?” she asked.
“You’re too much of a bitch to be the dainty little helpless princess.”
“And you’re too much of a nerd to be a dominant alpha monster.”
“True, true.”
“It’ll be our personal Heavens,” she said. “We can be whatever we want, right? I can be a dainty little helpless princess.”
“You’re already little.”
“Coming from you, that’s rich.”
“Well, like you said, our own personal Heaven. You know, assuming that’s what’s awaiting us. It could be something different entirely.”
“Got some more examples?” she asked.
“An endless plane of cosmic exploration, souls drifting on an ethereal wind, with each breath a millennium.”
“Boring.”
“Yeap.”
David, her fellow head sitting on a couch cushion, shook his head before looking down, smile fading.
“I’m scared to go.”
Sighing, she looked down at her cushion, too.
“I’m scared too, but we’re ghosts. The fuck else are we supposed to do?”
“Find out how we died, and haunt the person who killed us?”
“Assuming–”
“We were killed,” he said. “I know I know. But, let’s just… give it a bit, okay? I have to know. I can’t not know.”
She smiled at him. Yeap, he was in one of his special moods, the kind that didn’t let up until he resolved whatever it was on his mind. It made him hard to deal with sometimes, because it’d full-on stop every other aspect of his life until he did, sometimes even eating and sleeping. And right now, it meant that to him, the idea of leaving before they found out how they died was pretty much impossible.
And truth was, she wasn’t just scared of going through a glowing door into some sort of afterlife. She was terrified. A lot of ghosts probably were. And no way she was going without her brother.
“Alright,” she said. “Let’s stick around until we learn more.”