Deadgirl

No.

Warm.

Content?

Drained away.

Drained away like a gas tank, like a pile of firewood.

A hungry flame took everything in its greedy mouth and swallowed it whole.

My eyes fluttered open again.

“What?” I whispered.

Overhead, the baleful yellow light glared down at me. I felt my fingers curl against the asphalt, raking my fingertips with jagged lines of pain. My butt felt flattened and sore—my spine felt like it had been stretched over a pile of broken glass. The back of my head, resting against the ground, felt raw and sensitive, and every tiny motion of my body sent an ache through my skull.

Blue above me. Daytime blue. The golden light wasn’t the streetlight—it was too warm now, amber instead of perverse yellow. A cloud floated in the bright blue sky just above me, in the shape of a rabbit, or maybe one of those fat little pug dogs. I blinked. I raised my hands to rub my eyes against the glaring light.

I sucked in a breath and touched my stomach. I sat up, ignoring a racking stiff pain in my back, and looked down.

My shirt was still torn and stained with blood. I grabbed the edges of the hole and tore. The fabric ripped easily, revealing my bare stomach. Brown, dried blood flaked off of my stomach with the movement, but most of it clung tightly to my skin. I shuddered and probed at my abdomen with trembling fingers. I felt no sudden stab of pain, no aching sickness.

I touched where the hole that took my life should be. Smooth skin, beneath the blood. No scar, no puckered skin, no gaping maw. Just nothing. Just me.

Alive?

My eyes began to adjust to the day, and I turned my head to either side of me. Just parking lot, the office building with its empty, dark windows. In the distance, over the hedges that lined the parking lot, I could see chunks of the Set’s landscape against the sky.

I sat up, slowly at first, expecting some rush of agony or wave of dizziness, but I felt nothing. Nothing beyond the norm, anyway. I touched my stomach again, ran my fingers harder across the skin. Trying to find the pain. Some part of me wanted it to be there. Some sign, other than the blood, that it all wasn’t some dream.

But I felt nothing, other than my fingers and the crusted blood and a nagging terror that I was about to wake up.

I checked my pockets—I had my phone, my wallet, my keys. If I’d been robbed, someone had done a pretty crappy job. I turned my phone over and pressed the menu button. The screen didn’t light up. Dead. I made a sound in the back of my throat that I only just recognized as a stifled laugh.

Without it, I didn’t even know the time. I stared up at the sky, trying to read it like I knew what I was doing. I guessed noon by the height of the sun, but I’d never even been a Brownie as a little girl. I liked camping and the outdoors, but a wild trailblazer I was not. I insisted on an inflatable mattress every time, in fact.

I stood, again expecting the wash of dizziness. Nothing. As I cleared the hedges blocking my view, I could see the gigantic parking lot encircling the Set was only mildly full. Saturday morning wasn’t the busiest time—it certainly wasn’t the chaotic swarm of a Friday night.

Something glittered on the asphalt when I moved my head. I looked down. A small revolver sat on the ground, looking pathetic and cast-off. It didn’t even frighten me, I realized—in fact, I smirked. So much for the dream theory.

I knelt, and my bare knee scraped the asphalt. I barely noticed. Against the advice of every TV cop show I’d ever seen, I picked up the little gun and turned it in my hand.

It looked old, out-of-repair. It looked like a dad’s gun, absconded by a punk kid. My old shooting range sessions with my dad, another self-defense insistence, came back to me without too much trouble. I slid the small metal catch toward the grip, and the cylinder popped open.

I pushed the ejection rod, and the bullets all clattered onto the asphalt. Except one. One made a bright, hollow tinging sound before it came to rest. Five little cartridges stood out against the blacktop—the sixth was empty. Sans-bullet.

I touched my stomach again. I pinched the empty cartridge between two fingers and held it up to my eyes. Small, brass, insignificant. It didn’t even smell like powder anymore. I dropped it into my coat pocket, scattered the rest of the bullets with my foot, and kicked the revolver toward the hedges. It didn’t make it, but I didn’t care. The urge to hide my own murder wasn’t particularly strong.

I started walking. I knew I should stop, reflect, think. Check myself again, check more thoroughly. I heard about shock—I knew some people could keep fighting with their guts hanging out or whatever, but this didn’t seem to fit. I didn’t think shock made you hallucinate that you’d healed completely and survived both a gunshot wound and an entire night of unsupervised blood loss.

I kept my eyes forward, and my mind empty.

I left the office grounds and crossed the huge parking lot in a pleasant daze.

When I stepped up onto the sidewalk around the mall, after a Moses-like exile in the parking desert, I realized people were staring at me. The first couple I’d ignored—I had other things on my mind. It wasn’t until the third person passed by, staring at what looked like my chest in naked shock, that I put their confusion together.

I glanced down. My shirt was torn open into a pop star-like midriff-exposing masterpiece. The only thing ruining the image was the smear of dried blood streaking my belly. My eyes popped open, and I tugged my coat closed and buttoned it up to my chest. I groaned—further proof that no dream had taken place, and that no insanity spared my brain from some trauma. Other people were starting to notice it too—a special brand of crazy, if there was one.

I wondered briefly about hallucinating that people were staring at me, but that road lead to darkness. If my brain could dream up the people around me, then I was so deep into schizophrenia that I didn’t have to worry about it. Once you become so crazy, I guessed, everything becomes real. No use in nit- picking.

My eyes drifted across the small groups of people wandering through the brightly-decorated alleyways and streets of the Set, an outdoor mall designed as one-part maze, one-part Disneyland, and too-many-parts high school. Most people, this early on Saturday, looked to be married couples angling to beat the crowds. Only a few teenagers wandered the sidewalk, and most of them looked confused and kind of sad, like the zombies in Dawn of the Dead.

My second zombie reference in as many days. Both teenage references too. I wondered if I had something going there.

I watched them all with a distant kind of haze creeping through my body—I felt oddly warm, and yet my mouth felt cold, like before a really good regurgitation. My fingertips tingled, and I felt an ice water trickle dripping down my back. The skin of my arms and chest and face radiated heat. When I touched my fingers to my cheek, it felt like I was storing hot coals in my mouth. I pinched my tongue with two fingers, a rather strange inspection, I admit, and it burned, too.

What the hell?

The symptoms began to creep into my body not long after I entered the mall and the further I walked, the deeper into the mall, my feverish heat only escalated. I wasn’t sweating, but I should have been—it felt like the middle of summer had risen from the grave to throw its angry radiance on me and me alone. Some of the people around me were wearing jackets.

I wanted to climb out of my coat, but that wasn’t gonna happen, not with the I-killed-a-hobo blood streaking my body. That and the shirt that I’d torn open was whorish and tacky. A minor concern, I realized, but it didn’t change my mind at all.

The ice water sluicing down my back became colder as my skin began to blaze. I thought about hot flashes, and I snorted. I was a little young for menopause, magic bullet be damned.

My fingers touched the cold brass casing in the pocket of my coat. I felt a very real, very normal chill. I pulled