Suddenly, I hear a scream from the doorway. I turn, and there is an old lady who must have just walked through the door and seen us being robbed at gunpoint. Instead of acting like a normal person and backing out quietly, she screamed. Really?
Shockingly, I hear a loud explosion, and something slams into my forehead that fucking hurts worse than the time I got a marble in the forehead from a slingshot when I was 11. And that is the last thing I remember before everything goes black.
Chapter Two
With a jarring abruptness, the pain in my forehead wakes me up. I bring my hand to my head to feel for the bump that I think I should have, but there’s nothing there. It’s smooth, and there’s no pain. I look down and see that I am sitting in a chair a wooden chair-and I am on a porch overlooking a lake.
Hearing a noise, I turn around and see a table next to me, and on the other side is an old man reading through papers from a manila folder.
“Hmm,” I say, but the old man holds up his hand.
While I wait for him to speak to me, I look him over. He seems to be in his eighties, with a long white beard and short white hair. His beard is clean and well kept. There are wrinkles all over his face, and it’s a face that is strong in character. He keeps looking through his papers and mumbling to himself now and then.
How the fuck did I get here? Judging by my surroundings, it seems like I’m at some kind of cottage on a lake. The sun isn’t high, so it’s about late afternoon. I can even see ducks on the water. I look at the old man again. He is wearing jeans, cowboy boots, and a red and black western-style shirt. He has a pipe in his mouth that keeps blowing aromatic smoke, which I get a whiff of every now and then. It smells nice, I think absently.
Where the hell am I? The last thing I remember is being with my boss Joshua, and getting robbed by a man in a ski mask who started panicking near the end. Then an old lady walked in, screamed, and set the robber off. Thinking back on it, I think I heard an explosion as well.
“Excuse me,” I try speaking to the old man again.
He looks up and sighs in exasperation. “Listen kid, I am trying to go through your paperwork as fast as I can. I just want five minutes. Is that too much to ask?” he says, turning to me. The gaze he gives me is so intensely powerful that I lose my tongue and just nod to him, swallowing hard. The old man nods, puffs out more smoke from his pipe and turns away, looking back down at the paperwork in front of him.
What does he mean, my paperwork? I don’t bother asking, as it seems like asking questions won’t get me anywhere anyway, but it will make him look at me again with those piercing eyes. And that gaze! What the hell?!? It’s like I had lost the ability to speak.
After a couple of minutes of sitting quietly, I realize it’s kind of peaceful here. I never was a nature kind of person. I grew up in the city of Boston, the same as my last name, and never really traveled. My mom has been a full-time nurse since I was two years old, and my dad, before he passed away, worked for the city as some kind of city manager. They never really took me on camping trips or to a cabin. When we went away, it was to places like Disney or Florida, to stay in some type of timeshare.
After being quiet for a good ten minutes, the old man turns to me. “So we have a problem, kid,” he tells me with a heavy sigh.
“Problem?” I ask him, as I’m not sure what’s going on.
“You died early,” the old man says, nodding as he puts the folder on the table between us.
I look at him strangely, not understanding what he means. Died early? What does he mean died early? I feel quite alive. I reach down as I’ve seen people do in movies and I pinch myself, and feel genuine pain at the act.
“How can I be dead?” I ask the old man with a small laugh. “Is this some kind of joke that someone is playing on me?” But the nervous laugh I let out shows just how unsure I’m feeling.
“What do you remember last?” the old man asks, looking at me with a soft gaze this time.
“I was with my boss Joshua, and we were getting robbed,” I tell him, a frown on my face. “Then there was an old lady who walked in on the robbery, and she screamed. After that, it’s all black. I am not sure what happened,” I finish, my face scrunched up in concentration.
“Well, I can tell you. You died. That bullet went straight through your head. In and out,” the old man sighs. “You were not the intended victim. It wasn’t your time.”
I look at him oddly. “What do you mean, I was not the intended victim?” I ask him.
The old man takes the pipe out of his mouth and bangs it against the side of the porch, knocking the ashes out of it. I watch as they flutter away on the wind. He takes a pouch out of his right side pants pocket and fills up the bowl again before putting the pouch away. Then he produces a match from his other pocket and lights the pipe up again, puffing away before he begins to speak.
“So, you were not supposed to
