Member-only story
Grudge Match
The afterlife may not be so forgiving after all…
There were some downsides to dying in a car crash — other than the obvious, of course.
Joey Farland watched his own body struggling to breathe, each gasp letting out a small fog of air through already bluish lips. Everything else seemed muted, colorless, even as police were trying to cut through the crinkled metal that had crushed his body. It was as if disbelief was his only mode of being. Nothing seemed real.
A blink later, he was in the ambulance, watching as paramedics tried — and failed — to resuscitate him. Even the pain was just a dullness he felt barely connected to. He felt like he was watching a stranger’s last moments of life rather than his own. All he could do was drift through the ambulance — funny, that, being able to move through solid objects — until he was watching the slow clean-up of the twisted and burned metal of the three cars.
When he looked past the remnants of the people who remained at the scene, he saw a girl dressed in an over-large sweater, leggings, and boots. She looked just as deadened as he did as she watched the towing of a red Camry that didn’t look nearly as crushed as his own car had.
Then her eyes found his, and the black holes sharpened into bright spheres. In just a moment, she was standing before…
