Stanley glanced over his shoulder to see the semi truck weaving off the road, headed straight towards him.
He dove out of the way and tumbled onto the gravel, scraping the hell out of his arm and the side of his face.
The semi came to a screeching halt.
Then it started to topple over.
Stanley frantically tried to scoot away from the falling vehicle and almost succeeded. It struck the ground with a thunderous crash, landing on Stanley's left foot.
He shrieked in pain.
Cold white liquid began to pour from the vehicle. Stanley got a huge mouthful of milk and spit it out, but more and more milk poured upon him. He desperately struggled to free his pinned foot to no avail. As he screamed, milk filled his mouth and his nostrils and burned his lungs and his eyes and he felt himself choke.
Unrestrained panic set in.
He couldn't breathe.
His arms flailed helplessly.
And then a moment of peace.
A moment of clarity.
I can't fucking believe I'm going to die by drowning in milk, he thought.
CHAPTER TWO
'We're going live in fifteen seconds!'
Donald Mandigan clenched the microphone tightly in his left hand, hoping that the beads of sweat on his forehead wouldn't be visible on camera. This was either going to be the big break that turned him into a television superstar, or he was going to look like a complete ass in front of the entire world.
Please, please, please don't let me look like a complete ass in front of the entire world, he prayed.
'Live in five…four…three…'
Donald took a deep breath. As the floor manager pointed to him, he addressed the camera.
'Death. Once upon a time, it was thought to be the end of our worldly existence, at least in our current body. But has this changed?'
Donald gestured to a steel door in the hallway behind him. 'Behind this very door, scientists are taking out their felt-tipped red pens and rewriting God's plan. And here, on live television, you are about to witness it for yourself. I'm Donald Mandigan. What you are about to see may disturb you. It may offend you. It may even terrify you. Because tonight you will witness the very first resurrection of a human corpse, or at least the first one since that popular Jewish carpenter a couple of millennia ago.'
Please, please, please, please, please don't let me look like an ass, he silently begged.
'Is what you will see tonight wrong? Is it evil? Is it perhaps even the beginning of the end? I suppose that's only for the man upstairs to decide.'
Donald paused for a moment of reverent silence, then continued. 'The corpse in question is Stanley Dabernath. An ordinary man, taken from this world far too early in a tragic accident several weeks ago.'
'And…we're clear,' said the floor manager. 'Back in eight minutes.'
Donald wiped the perspiration from his forehead and forced himself to relax. The show had now switched to a pre-recorded retrospective of the life of Mr. Dabernath, from his normal childhood in Illinois to his sleaze-bucket years as a failed film distributor in Florida.
'If this show ends and there's still a motionless body on that table, I'm going to kick every butt in this place.'
'Don't worry about it,' said the cameraman. 'If the guy doesn't come back to life, we'll just tie some strings to him and make him dance around.'
'Real funny.' Donald ran his hand over his forehead again. 'Look at me, I'm sweating like a pig. I never sweat like a pig.'
Missy, the makeup girl who had refused to sleep with Donald on seven different occasions but caved in on three others, hurried over to touch him up.
Donald couldn't believe he was doing this. The ratings were probably going to be killer, far beyond any of the other Bizarre Reality specials he'd hosted, but the risk was incredible. There was a damn good chance that he'd spend the next hour of his life trying to convince the viewing audience that the motionless dead body on the table wasn't the biggest dud in the history of television.
Quite honestly, Donald didn't know why they hadn't just prerecorded the resurrection and told everybody it was live. After all, they were in an underground bunker in New Mexico, whose location had been kept secret to avoid the protestors. There'd been thousands of them gathered outside the network headquarters for the past week, and in fact seventeen of them had been badly injured when things got out of hand yesterday morning.
In the most recent poll, twenty-six percent of the American public was morally opposed to the resurrection, while twenty-three percent were in favor. Fifty-one percent thought the whole thing was bullshit.
Donald stood there for a few minutes, sweating and wondering what hilarious jokes the talk show hosts would crack at his expense if this was, in fact, bullshit.
'Did you all watch the show last night with Donald Mandigan? We didn't get to see a body come back to life, but we did get to see something die: his career!'
'We're back in five…four…three…'
At the floor manager's cue, Donald addressed the camera again. 'And now, ladies and gentlemen, let's go beyond the steel door.' He warned the audience again about the possibility of being disturbed, offended, and/or terrified, and then opened the door and walked inside the small room, followed by the cameraman.
The cadaver of Stanley Dabernath rested on a gurney, dressed only in a pair of white boxer shorts. Considering the amazing talent of contemporary mortuary workers, Donald felt they could've made the poor guy look a little less hideous, but at the same time the visible decomposition would make the return to life all that much more impressive. The cadaver's left foot was in a white plastic cast. Two scientists in white jackets stood around the gurney, and a dozen or so tubes were hooked up to the corpse.
'Welcome, Donald,' said the lead scientist, reading off a cue card. 'So glad you could join us.'
'The pleasure is all mine. Ladies and gentlemen, this is Richard Brant, head of Project Second Chance. Mr. Brant, how do you respond to those who feel that this is unnatural, that man should not be trying to conquer death?'
'I understand their concern,' he admitted. 'However, I believe that if the Good Lord has given us the creativity, persistence, and desire to bring a human being back from the dead, we'd be turning our back on His gifts if we didn't pursue it. As you know, Congress did not uphold the attempted ban on our project, and I feel that the possible benefits of our research simply cannot be overstated.'
'Let's talk about another question that I'm sure is on the minds of our viewing audience. Why Stanley Dabernath? With all due respect to Mr. Dabernath and his estate, he's not in the best physical shape at the moment, and I think viewers at home can consider themselves fortunate that they aren't here to experience the scent. Why wouldn't you use, for lack of a better term, a fresher specimen?'
'That's an excellent question,' said Brant. 'Of course, the body has been refrigerated for these past two months or else it would look substantially worse than what you see before you. However, while the science involved is too complicated to get into in this forum, suffice it to say that a certain amount of decomposition is required for our chemicals to work properly.'
'And what exactly are these chemicals?'
Brant chuckled. 'Oh, no. You're not getting that information out of me until we get the patent.'
Donald returned his attention to the camera. 'We're only moments away from the attempted resurrection of the corpse you see here before you,' he said, perfectly aware that the actual resurrection was at least three commercial breaks away. 'Please stay with us as we bring you this historic and controversial moment, live.'
As the show went to commercial, Donald looked over the body. There was no doubt that it was dead. He'd
