Redlisted by Sara Beaman Read Free Book Online Page B

around myself. I don’t want to
think about what I’ve just seen. I don’t want to think
about anything.
    Adam pauses. “If
there’s anything I can—“
    No, I think with force. Please
just go now.
    He stands up.
“Well,” he says after a long pause, “try and get
some sleep.” He turns to leave, shutting the door behind him.
    I slowly uncurl
myself, crawl over to the sleeping bag, and wriggle inside. I fall
asleep seconds after I close my eyes.

8
A Dream of Dying

    {Adam}
    Aya and I walked
back to my rooms in silence. The surge of emotion quickly dulled,
leaving a deep chasm, grey and featureless, in its absence. By the
time we arrived at the suite I was perfectly calm once again.
Wretchedly calm.
    Aya opened the
door to my suite for me with a polite smile. “Please call me if
you need anything. There’s a phone in your office. My extension
is twenty-one.”
    “Thanks,”
I said, avoiding eye contact. I slipped past her and locked the door
behind me.
    What now? I had
come back here to be alone with my grief, but now I was just alone. I
didn’t want to sleep; I didn’t want to risk having
another vision of someone else’s memories. I had no desire to
look at my textbooks or look through my desk. And I couldn’t
call Alison again, not with the way her mother had reacted—
    I brought a hand
to my forehead. Again I was thinking about her like she was alive. As
if I could call and talk to her. After all, I was dead too, wasn’t
I? Apparently death was a mutable quantity.
    I walked into the
office and sat down in the desk chair. I picked up the photo of
myself and Alison and tried to recall what happened. It had been a
car accident, apparently. Had we been hit or had we hit someone? Who
had been driving? Why couldn’t I remember any of it?
    I needed to talk
to someone. I wanted someone to explain to me what happened in plain
terms. Maybe then it would start feeling real. But anyone who knew
anything about the accident would know I was dead. Who would take a
call from someone whose funeral they’d just attended?
    If I wanted to
talk to someone, it’d have to be someone who wouldn’t
have attended my funeral. Someone who wouldn’t have heard about
the accident, either. No one in Baltimore would do; probably no one
in New York either.
    That left only one
option. I’d have to hope she wouldn’t hang up on me.
    I placed the
picture face-down on the desk and picked up the telephone. I hadn’t
called my ex-girlfriend Elena more than twice since she’s moved
to Atlanta six years ago, but her number came to mind easily as my
fingers moved across the dial.
    Her son picked up
on the other end. “Hello?”
    “Hello. Is
Dr. Ortiz there?”
    “Who is
this?”
    “Uh—Dr.
Radcliffe,” I lied. “From the CDC.”
    “Oh, okay,”
he said. “Hold on, she just got in.”
    There was a long
pause and some shuffling sounds as the phone changed hands.
    “Hello?”
came Elena’s voice on the other end.
    I gritted my teeth
and gathered my will to reply. “Elena? It’s Adam.”
    She was silent for
several seconds.
    “I’m
sorry to borrow you,” I said. “I just... I...” I
looked at the ceiling, at a loss as to why I was calling her at all.
“Alison is dead,” I blurted out.
    “Adam, I
know. You told me. On Thursday. Don’t you remember?”
    “What?”
    “You told me
when you called me on Thursday.”
    “I don’t
remember that at all.” How could I have called her? Didn’t
Aya say I was in a coma? “So what day is it now?”
    “It’s
Monday,” she replied, annoyed. “What do you mean you
don’t remember?”
    “I...”
    “Were you
drunk?” She sounded disgusted. “Are you drunk now?”
    The room suddenly
seemed like it was expanding, or I was getting smaller in it. I heard
a faint ringing in my ears.
    “Oh God. I
wasn’t... when the car crashed... was I?” I couldn’t
remember. “Was I driving?”
    “I don’t
know. Were you?”
    I had no idea.
Looking back, I saw nothing but a black