The Wrong Dead Guy

  “What makes you think you’re going to be able to do it this time?”

  “Because we have a secret weapon.”

  “What.”

  “You. You’ll be reporting back to us via radio everything you see, hear, small, feel, and taste.”

  “That’s very optimistic of you,” said Coop. “Most of what you’re probably going to get is a lot of screaming and cursing.”

  “Try to control yourself, Cooper,” said Woolrich. “You’re a full DOPS agent now. Act like it.”

  “Then I’ll scream and curse in triplicate. In case you haven’t noticed, I’m not the hero type.”

  “No one is asking you to be a hero. All you have to do is get from point A to point B. Hide in the shadows if it makes you feel better. Crawl on your belly. Swing from branch to branch. I don’t care.”

  “You left out the most important part. The part where I don’t get eaten.”

  “There’s nothing down there that’s going to eat you,” said the woman with the embosser. “Not all of you anyway.”

  Coop looked at Woolrich. “Why don’t I leave Phil with you and take her instead? She’s fun.”

  “Are you going to fulfill your part of the contract? Yes or no?”

  “Yes, I’m going to do it,” said Coop, feeling the bottom of his stomach sink to somewhere around Antarctica. “How am I going in? Rappel from a helicopter? Get lowered down an elevator shaft? Or maybe I crawl through an air vent like in Die Hard?”

  “Don’t be ludicrous. That would never work in the real world.”

  “Then how am I supposed to get in?”

  Woolrich pushed a button under his desk and part of the wall slid away. There was a clear plastic cylinder about three feet wide with a door set in the side. “We’re going to shoot you down through a pneumatic tube.”

  Coop looked around the room. No one was laughing. “Aren’t pneumatic tubes how people in the olden times used to send messages and little packages?”

  “Exactly.”

  “And, if I remember right, it works because there’s a vacuum inside the tube.”

  “That’s basic physics.”

  “Speaking as someone who likes his lungs on the inside, no thanks,” said Coop.

  Woolrich went to the tube. “We don’t just jam you in there like so much bacon. You’ll wear a pressurized suit with a breathing unit.”

  Coop walked to the tube and tried to see down inside. The light didn’t go very far before it became a black void. “Why do you have people-size pneumatic tubes in the first place if no one can use them?”

  “That’s classified,” said the embosser woman.

  “Wait,” Coop said. “Is this how you get all the dead bodies around the building without anybody seeing them?”

  “That’s also classified,” said the man with the rubber stamps.

  Coop went back around the desk. “I’m not jumping down your garbage disposal. Aside from my neurotic fear of becoming suddenly dead, who knows what kind of diseases are in those tubes?”

  “We give them a flush-out every now and then,” said Woolrich. “Otherwise they start to smell.”

  “No. I’m not today’s sacrificial turd.”

  Woolrich sighed. “Cooper, what did we talk about when you got here?”

  “Your days as an Elvis impersonator?”

  “Your career. You signed a full-agent contract, meaning you’re whatever the DOPS needs you to be.”

  Coop frowned. “And I get hazard pay for this?”

  Woolrich nodded. “Time and a half.”

  “I want double,” said Coop.

  “Too late. You should have read the rest of the contract.”

  “You said there wasn’t time.”

  “There wasn’t.”

  “Cute. Okay, Hugo Boss. Suit me up.”

  “Good man,” said Woolrich. He touched an intercom on his desk. “Get a team up here to grease down this slider and squeeze him into a corpse bun.” He let up on the button. “Don’t worry about any of that. It’s just technical jargon. You wouldn’t understand.”

  “Unfortunately,” said Coop, “I think I do.”

  A team of six people stripped Coop down and covered him from head to toe in a clear gel so that he could squeeze into a skintight carbon-fiber suit that made him feel less like a secret government agent and more like a bratwurst having second thoughts about his life choices, his sanity, and whether he would be able to keep down those chili cheese fries he’d eaten earlier.

  As the team began the laborious task of fitting him with a miniature breathing apparatus, Phil popped into his head.

  “That lube looks cold,” he said.

  “It is.”

  “I’m only asking because I couldn’t help noticing a certain amount of shrinkage. Are you nervous?”

  “No. Are you?”

  “No. I just sensed that you were, so I was going to be sympathetic because you’re such a big crybaby.”

  “You’re the one who sounds nervous, Mr. Chatterbox,” said Coop.

  “You have to admit, this assignment is a bit more . . . well, lethal than your usual fare.”

  “That’s why you’re here.”

  “To shepherd you through danger. I’m touched.”

  “And to go down with me if I’m eaten like an after-dinner mint.”

  “In case you don’t make it and I do, is there anything you want me to tell your loved ones?” said Phil.

  “That it was all your fault and you should be burned as a witch.”

  “Love and kisses all around. Got it.”

  “I knew I could count on you.”

  A technician grabbed Coop’s head and shoved different-size mouthpieces into his face in an apparent attempt to see which one hurt the most. Satisfied that he’d found the most agonizing size and shape, he let Coop go.

  “Don’t forget,” said Phil. “When you’re a DOPS ghost, I’ll have seniority, so you might want to start buttering me up.”

  “When I’m dead, I’m off the clock. I’m not working for anyone.”

  “Did you even read your contract?”

  “Parts.”

  “Obviously the wrong ones.”

  “I started at DOPS before you, so I’ll have seniority,” said Coop.

  “Not as a ghost. In the afterlife, I foresee you doing a lot of coffee runs and filing.”

  “Who are you talking to?” said Woolrich. He was wearing galoshes so the lube wouldn’t get on his Italian shoes.

  “I’m was just going over strategy with Phil,” said Coop.

  “You only need one strategy: keep moving and don’t die.”

  “If Coop does die, I’ll have ghost seniority, right?” said Phil.

  “I started at DOPS before him. I should have seniority.”

  A flunky ran up to Woolrich and he signed more paperwork. “Did you even read your contract, Cooper?”

  “You told me there wasn’t time.”

  “And you listened? Good man.” Woolrich clapped him on the arm. “Get ready for insertion.”

  “Don’t go too far, Mr. Woolrich,” said Phil. “Remember we have another session tomorrow.”

  As Woolrich walked away he said, “Try not to bring him back. There’s a bonus in it for you.”

  It wasn’t clear which one of them he was talking to.

  Another technician pulled a clear skintight mask down over Coop’s face while the sadist with the mouthpiece shoved it between Coop’s gums hard enough to loosen a couple of fillings.

  Do I even have dental? thought Coop. I really need to read my contract.

  Breathing compressed oxygen through his mouth now, Coop was led by two of the technicians to the corpse disposal and opened the door.

  “Can you hear me, Phil?” said Coop in his head.

  “Yes?”

  “Start screaming.”

  The technicians shoved Coop into the tube and slammed shut the door. Woolrich gave him a quick wave and pressed a button on his desk.

  “I w
onder if he has a go-fuck-yourself button on his magic desk,” said Phil.

  “If not, let’s buy him one.”

  A second later, he was falling. It wasn’t a regular fall. It was more like being a piece of spaghetti sucked down the gullet of a particularly long-necked monster. A ball-tightening death luge through an amusement park designed by Charlie Manson and Mr. Hyde blind drunk on moonshine. What Coop at first thought was the roar of the vacuum in his ears he later realized was Phil shrieking. Apparently, being dead and not having to breathe meant that once you got a good scream going, there wasn’t anything to stop you except boredom.

  As they were shunted from tube to tube, Coop lost track of time. “Phil?” he said.

  The screaming stopped. “Yes?”

  “Are you all right?”

  “You interrupted a perfectly good wail to ask me something that stupid?”

  “I’m just trying to take your mind off things so you’ll stop with the noise for two seconds.”

  “Oh, I haven’t even begun to scream. What you just heard was only the warm-up exercise. You want to hear a real scream? Get ready.”

  A second later, they slammed to a halt. Stopping was possibly more unpleasant than the fall because Coop’s internal organs felt like they weren’t done luging when the rest of him was. He wasn’t sure his kidneys had really lodged themselves behind his knees, but he planned to use some of his DOPS insurance to get X-rays.

  If I even have insurance.

  “Is it over?” said Phil.

  Through the clear walls of the L Wing’s pneumatic tube, Coop watched a large blue lobster whose head bore a strange resemblance to Lucille Ball drag a legless body in a lab coat up a steam pipe and disappear into the overhead ductwork.

  “No,” said Coop. “I’m going out on a limb and saying it’s not over.”

  “You can do what you want,” said Phil. “But I’m not going out there.”

  “I am, which means you are.”

  “Coop, you don’t have to do this. We can just stay in our cozy little tube until this whole thing blows over. I give it six months tops.”

  “I’ll be dead by then,” said Coop.

  “And I’ll be your boss, so everybody wins.”

  “Except me.”

  “It’s always about you, isn’t it? What about my needs?”

  “I’m going out.”

  “Oh, man . . .”

  Coop pushed the pneumatic-tube door open. The sound of air rushing in to fill the vacuum was deafening. He gingerly put out one leg, and seeing that it made it to the floor while still attached to his body, he put out the other. With both feet firmly on the ground, he pushed himself out of the tube and closed the door.

  Safety lights flickered on and off. Alarms wailed. Coop pressed himself against the wing’s metal wall and removed his mouthpiece. His first breath of fresh air wasn’t as refreshing as he’d hoped. In his work, Coop had encountered the occasional banshee, werewolf, or swamp goblin—and more recently the Pontianaks and Domovois—but he’d never encountered them in large numbers and it had always been in well-ventilated surroundings. However, in the stuffy, hermetically sealed confines of L Wing, the heady odor of musk and the potent breath of a dozen species of crazed hell beasts mingled with the death in the stale air to form a perfect storm of stink.

  “It’s like someone filled a monkey house with farts and garlic,” said Phil.

  “I think we just found the DOPS’s next superweapon.”

  “I think that we could be a little outgunned. Maybe you should check in with the people upstairs.”

  Coop touched the button to activate the radio in the suit’s hood. “Hello? Mr. Woolrich?”

  Nothing came back.

  “Hello?”

  “Is the radio broken?” said Phil.

  “I think the radio is broken. We’re on our own.”

  “What do you have in that bag they gave you?”

  “The override code, and some medical stuff. Morphine.”

  “Now you’re talking,” said Phil.

  “And some stuff I sneaked in.”

  “What?”

  “Nothing we’ll probably need. Last-resort stuff.”

  “You’re not going to do something stupid like kill yourself, are you? Suicide ghosts are the worst. Imagine the most neurotic, most annoying person you know—”

  “This sounds familiar.”

  “They won’t shut up and they won’t stop whining and everybody hates them and it goes on forever.”

  “You just described yourself, Phil.”

  “What? Nobody hates me.”

  “Besides, I’m not the suicide type. This is other last-resort stuff.”

  “Fine, but nobody hates me.”

  “If you say so. I’m going to start moving.”

  “Where?”

  Coop pointed to his left. “That way.”

  “Why?”

  “Because look what’s the other way.”

  A smorgasbord of short-circuiting cyborgs accompanied by hairy, bony, scaly, fleshy, and furred monstrosities was walking, crawling, and slithering in their direction. Some carried pieces of wrecked equipment as clubs. Some carried the enormous bones of other beasts. Some gnawed on unidentifiable carcasses with their grotesque fangs, beaks, or feeding tubes.

  “Do you really think you can outrun them?” said Phil.

  “I’m going to try. They said there are spirits down here, too. They’re your job. Mine is not to get us killed.”

  “I suppose this isn’t a good time to bring up my abandonment issues. It all started when I was a kid . . .”

  “Here we go,” said Coop. He pushed off the wall as hard as he could and started running.

  Death curses and killing and crippling hexes hit him from all directions. Some tickled, while others burned and scratched, but none were strong enough to slow him down. From the unhappy sounds of the mob behind him, this was considered as rude and a good excuse to eat him, probably slowly, and probably from several different directions at once.

  “Can’t you run any faster?” shouted Phil. “You’re like a basket of kittens dragging a boxcar of dumbbells up a ski slope.”

  “The bunny trail or the advanced?”

  “Advanced.”

  “Go fuck yourself, Phil.”

  “Be nice. There’s a pack of poltergeists ahead.”

  Coop had never seen Phil deal with other ghosts before. It wasn’t pretty. As the poltergeists got into Coop’s head, Phil jumped them. To Coop’s surprise, while Phil and most other ghosts were invisible, when they were bent on kicking each other’s asses inside a person’s head, they became highly visible streaks and bursts of light. Coop thought that under other circumstances—such as when he wasn’t being pursued by a hit squad of demented ogres—the ghostly battle might be interesting to see. After all, Phil spent a good deal of his time being as useless as a cotton-candy life raft and it would be nice to see him actually do something for a change. At the moment, however, all the lightning flashes from Phil’s ectoplasmic Bruce Lee moves did was blind Coop. He kept running, but the more ghosts that came at him, the less he could see. And the death curses and hexes kept hitting from all sides.

  Coop turned a corner and smashed into a pile of plastic storage containers. He didn’t fall, but he did manage a soft-shoe routine worthy of Fred Astaire. Some of the creatures behind him didn’t do so well. He could hear them falling and sliding around the hallway as they ran into the containers.

  “Phil,” Coop yelled. “I can’t see. What the hell are you doing?”

  “Saving your bacon, porkpie. Now shut up.”

  Coop bounced off a ventilation pipe and rebounded off a steel support column. Blind and exhausted, all he could do was dive behind a piece of equipment that resembled an upside-down pizza oven with metal claws.

  Fortunately for him, broken robots and preternatural horrors aren’t big planners, especially when they’re bunched together in a bloodthirsty mob. They ran right past the pizza
oven, clanking, howling, and wailing.

  All Coop could do was lie on his back while Phil finished off the last of the Jacob Marleys. When the flashing in his head stopped, he had no idea how much time had passed or whether he was still, in fact, alive.

  “Phil?” he said. “You there?”

  It took a minute, but finally he heard a terse, “Shut up and let me catch my breath.”

  “Okay,” said Coop. “But tell me this, is it over? With the ghosts, I mean.”

  “I think so,” Phil said. “I hope so.”

  “Are you okay?”

  “No, I’m not okay. I barely got started on my abandonment issues.”

  “You’re okay,” said Coop. He got to his knees and looked around. “I think we’re in the clear. I don’t see anything. Do you?”

  “No. But where are we?”

  “We’ve run around most of L Wing. The keypad must be up there somewhere. I don’t think it’s far.”

  “Don’t think or don’t know? Where’s the map?” said Phil.

  “They didn’t give me one. They were going to direct me over the radio.”

  “Of course they were. And they were going to get me tickets for Cats, but they didn’t do that either.”

  Coop took another look around. The hall appeared deserted.

  “I know the way out is just ahead. I just have to convince my legs so they’ll move.”

  “I’ll just kick back, shall I, until you decide whether you want to get up, trampled, or eaten?”

  “Okay,” said Coop. “I’m going for it.”

  “Run, Forrest, run.”

  Coop blasted out from his hiding place, and when he took the first corner, everything was clear.

  “You’re doing it, buddy. You’re doing it,” said Phil.

  But it all went to hell around turn two.

  While the beasts and cyborgs without working brains were content to run around and around L Wing eating and/or crushing whatever wandered into view, a few of the mob had just enough reasoning power to know that if they stayed put, dinner would come to them.

  As Coop rounded the second turn he was elated. “I can see the keypad.”

  “Good job. Now shut up and keep running.”