“I can prove it, even more than this does. Because, you know, 
bringing someone back to life isn’t something a paper can prove. If 
you saw aliens on live television you might still be skeptic because 
you weren't there in person and it challenges your views too harshly. 
This is the same way. So, let me give you a little taste of what | am 
capable of doing.” 


The car came on, honked three times, and turned its brights on and 
off. This, of course, startled the daylights out of everyone there 
except maybe Jerry. Looking back at Rachael, she showed that she 


had nothing in her hands. 

“Give me a beat.” 

“A what?” 

“A beat, like — oh, the Mario Bros. theme.” 


Hon-hon-honk hon-honk honk, honk. It continued to play the Mario 
Bros. theme (without a tune, just the beats of the song), as Rachael 
seemed to conduct it with her hands. She even encorporated the 
sound of the brights clicking on and off sometimes. 


“It’s not like | believe you, but holy shit, this is weird.” 
“So we can get in the car?” 


“Uh... well... wait, no/ Answers, damn it! And | am the leader of my 
posse, it’s not like you can just waltz in here and take over! What the 
hell is happening?” 


“| said no questions asked, where was | unclear on that?” 


“| dunno, everything became slightly muddled when you claimed to 
have fucking BROUGHT someone BACK from the DEAD.” 


“I’m not going to lie, man, | am scared of her, | think —” 


“Scared of her?! You never admit that in front of someone! | was 
team leader, | am continuing to be team fucking leader? 


“For a day, babe. You have been ‘team leader’ for a day. She 
revived a dude. Supposedly. She can tell us what’s going on. 
Maybe. So get off your high horse, come live with us peasants and 
let Rachael take the reigns.” 


“You just blindly believe her?!” 


The car revved its own engine. 


“ ” 


...Yes. 


Ed sat in his seething, clenching his fists and furrowing his brow at 


Rachael. His eye twitched a couple times, he glanced at Jerry in the 
car, and then he let out a deep, angry sigh. 


“Fine fine fine, Rachael take the reigns, fucking fine.” 
“Okay, good! Now, | need you all to discard your IDs.” 
“What?” 


“Oh come on. It’s common knowledge that IDs are trackable, the 
government has trace radioactive elements on IDs so that they can 
track you wherever you go if the situation calls for it. Slight 
differences in isotopes can tell them things about the person they’re 
tracking, up to and including the true identity. Everyone knows that." 


“They do...?” 


“Of fucking ‘course they do, what do you think —? Oh, fucking 
whatever. We're in too deep already, okay? Look, think of it this 
way: you are involved in possibly the first time in history that a man 
has come back from the dead — like, the absolutely irrefutably 
dead. Is that just something you take credit for?” 


We all glanced at each other. Was it? Why wouldn't it be? 


“No! If you came back from space and proved that you had traveled 
faster than the speed of light, then cool, but the public’s not getting 
to know that right away. That’s getting hushed up and you're getting 
taken in and interviewed and locked up. Maybe you get to work with 
the big names, but maybe not. There is so much fucking risk 
involved, do you get that? You are in too deep to not tread carefully! 
All of us are in this now, if anyone leaves it is a liability to everyone 
else. | was not expecting to be met with such stupid resistance, but 
you have made me feel the need to ask: are you in or aren't you?’ 


We all looked at each other nervously. Jerry didn’t really have a 
choice, so he just sat huddled up in his blankets. It was our, what, 
fifth uncomfortable silence? It sucked a lot. | was getting quite tired 
of this routine. Rachael pulled a heap of cut up ID out of her pocket 
and threw it on the ground. She motioned emphatically to us, and 


we all just looked at her. After a bit, Jai threw his ID onto the plastic 
remains, and stomped it. He looked up to Ed and | and pursed his 
lips. 


Reluctantly, | pulled out my ID, tried to snap it in half, was 
embarrassed when | wasn’t able to, and then did the same as Jai. 
Now Jai and | were both looking at Ed. He looked so angry and 
distasteful... He glanced between me, Rachael and Jai. Then, he 
took out his whole wallet, pulled out the money to keep, and then lit 
it aflame with a lighter (his wallet was hemp). He threw the flame 
onto the pile, and sneered at all of us. 


“Fine. | was having fun, too.” 
“Looks like I’m in for quite a ride.” 


“Certainly looks like it.” 


5: Philosophical Car Ride 


After she showed us to her abandoned car that she took the plates 
off of and retrieved cans of baby barf green paint out of, we were on 
the road again. Rachael had argued over how well we had done the 
paint job, and we kept telling her that it didn’t have to look good it 
just had to make the car unrecognizable. She had told us very 
clearly that when we got out to the cabin her parents own and she 
had the keys for that we needed to teach Jerry how to drive. That 
was to ensure that we didn’t get recognised while on the road. She 
was really quite glad that we were out of the city, because that 
meant that there weren't cameras at every intersection. Still, we 
were all nervous. We decided that Jai was the designated driver 
until Jerry could do it. Jai made sure that he had a hood on the 
whole time. He (and everybody else) just prayed that it didn’t impact 
his driving ability. 


We had large swaths of silence on our drive out to the cabin. After 
the first two hours of heated debate on what to do, we had decided 
to first be secluded. Some way to give ourselves time to think. 
Rachael assured us that by this point they would have figured out a 
body was missing and that we were missing too, and a search 


warrant would have been put out. Looking out into the wooded 
wilderness was, at the very least, calming. We all knew we weren't 
going back to school ever — or, in my case, that | was going back to 
Subway. As weird as it was, | really did enjoy being the manager of 
a Subway. Made me feel powerful. Paid enough for me to have 
hobbies. It was a damn shame to see it go. Now we were on the run, 
and man, that was interesting. Life as we knew it had already thrown 
itself off the top of a ten story building, but it seemed like change 
was going to just keep coming. | vouched that we learned 
wilderness survival skills and just sat up in the cabin, but Rachael 
assured us that as the search grows bigger the cabin would be 
checked — and even if not, her parents would come up there 
eventually. | said that we should just camp forever and be cavemen 
then. She told me to shut up. | rebutted that it was possible she had 
a stick up her butt. She rebutted by being right and it sucked. 


Rachael was adamant about not spilling any more beans until we 
were safe and sound in the cabin. It was annoying, and left 
everyone in a bad mood. Jai lamented about not getting to see his 
dog again. Ed lamented about not getting to go to parties anymore. 
Jai lamented that we didn’t bring any weed. Ed lamented that we 
didn’t bring any beer. | lamented that we didn’t bring any water, to 
which Rachael responded by pulling a water bottle out of her pack. 
That was nice. The last four hours of the ride were spent testing out 
each other’s music tastes. Rachael said she didn’t have any sort of 
music collection, which felt odd. | could have sworn | had seen her 
with ear buds before. Otherwise, Jai put on some weird geek rock, 
Ed put on some hip hop, and | played a bunch of pop songs turned 
Jazz. We all respectfully disagreed and also agreed to just go toa 
classic rock radio station and let it play itself out. 


| began to wonder how many times this must have happened before. 
| mean, humans have existed for, what, hundreds of thousands of 
years? Did it reach a million years? | had forgotten. | just knew it 
was a Crazy long time, and many, many, many humans had existed. 
| mean, it can’t have taken until 1995 for someone to end up with 
powers if it was a possibility, right? How many other crazy 
unimaginable things had not only been imagined but had come to 
fruition? How many other humans had made the trek back from the 
afterlife and into the world again? If | thought about it too hard, this 


whole situation could do more than just change my life forever, it 
could change my philosophies and experiences. | wasn’t ready for 
that, so | shushed up my thoughts. Started paying more attention to 
the music, and let it envelop me. It wasn’t good, to be certain, but 
music had a strange effect on me. | tranced out, and the landscape 
absorbed me. 


6: Cabin in the Woods 


“Okay. Fine, here we go.” 


Jerry, Jai, Ed and | all sat on a log outside the house and eagerly 
awaited an explanation. Our little fire was starting to really get going 
just as the sun was setting, which was nice. It was very cold up 
here. | suddenly felt very sorry for Jerry. He refused to be held, but 
Jai had offered. 


“I’m still not entirely sure myself. Don’t! Don’t, okay? Sit back down, 
shut your trap, let me talk. Good? Good. Okay, so, you know how 
the human body is run by the brain, and the human brain is all 
electricity? Well, | just, uh... | just... fiddled with electricity. | am not 
even sure what | did. It was like some otherworldly intuition. I’ve 
been having some really odd experiences with electricity since | was 
little, and | made some friends over the internet that seemed to sorta 
get it. Not, like, not that they had experienced the same things, per 
se, but that they got that weird shit just happened sometimes. | told 
them what was going on, and they told me how to revive someone. 
It’s not anything | can explain, okay? | can just... do it. The 
parameters are that the body has to be fresh enough that all the 
organs would function if they came back online. Jerry just was. | 
don’t really know how | knew that either, but Jerry was a guarantee. 
That’s it.” 


“Well that was the most unhelpful explanation.” 


“Well sorry for trying. Regardless, the goal — my goal, which | 
needed to make sure you were 100% in before telling you about — 
is to reveal this to the public.” 


“| thought the whole point was to stay out of the public eye.” 


“And it is, unti/ we can get it out to the public in a way that can not be 
hushed up. Something irrefutable. Something irrefutable that gets 
out to the entire country before anything can be done about it. That’s 
what we are looking for.” 


“This is suicide.” 
“Well, too late now, isn’t it?” 


The sun was fully below the horizon by this point. We were only lit 
by the fire, and my toes felt like they were freezing. | pulled up a 
camping chair that no one was using and set it by the fire, then 
using it as a foot rest heated up my feet. We all sipped on hot 
chocolate and sat in contemplative silence. | don’t think any of us 
were really used to silence, except maybe Jerry since he was just 
sorta born two days before. | mean, out of all the weird things that 
had happened — camping out and painting the car, finding a naked 
man in the trunk, stealing a license plate, picking up Rachael, the 
realisation that life as we knew it was gone, and we had all 
swallowed the pill and there was no going back at this point — this 
was what solidified it. The fact that all the time | might normally be 
spending talking to people, or getting drunk, or fucking, or working, | 
had spent quietly waiting. Everything felt so hectic, it was interesting 
that this chaos had come with so much stillness. Next time | looked 
over, Jerry was leaning on Jai and Jai had an arm around him. You 
couldn’t even hear the highway up here. It was peaceful. A part of 
me wished we didn’t have to leave. The sky was beautiful with 
minimal light pollution. | could faintly make out the milky way, and 
caught a shooting star. | never believed in it, but | never believed in 
people coming back from the dead either, so | thought | might give it 
a try: | wished that this was all a dream, and that | would wake up 
soon. That life might go back to normal, and that | could have my 
bed and my job and my friends back. Jacob and Richard and the 
like. | wished that everything was just as normal as | had thought it 
was before, or that there was an explanation in sight. Though, taking 
other people into account, | finally settled upon wishing that we were 
all gonna get away with this scott free. That would have been a nice 
fate. | closed my eyes, and thought | might sleep out under the stars 
tonight. 


“So when do | get to drive?” 


7: Jerry Saves Us From 
Ourselves 


Well, I’m getting tired of telling this story. | mean, sure, | have fond 
and not fond memories of the next few days, but | am going to cut to 
the chase. | can see your impatient looks, thought we might as well 
get to what you brought me here for. So we were trying to come up 
with ways to get it out, you know — the secret to human revival. We 
figure, you know, that we'd have to revive a celebrity. Someone 
everybody would notice if they were gone. Of course, the immediate 
idea was to kill someone, you know? Dirty business — Jai was not 
on board for moral reasons, Ed because it sounded difficult. | agreed 
with Ed. Rachael thought we were being weak. It had to be 
someone famous, someone that everybody would know was 
irrefutably dead, so that bringing them back would be irrefutable too. 
We thought long and hard, and of all of us Jerry — who was a 
natural at driving — piped up. 


“Why don’t you guys just wait for someone to die?” 


We brushed it off at first, you Know? There were way too many 
variables... firstly, wnen was someone famous gonna die? We had 
to be incognito until something like that happened, and being 
incognito is difficult. | mean, I’m sure you would know. Anyways, 
there was also the problem of where it would happen. Even if 
someone famous died, we would have to be there when it 
happened. That and for it to be a famous person identified as dead it 
would have to be kind of under... wraps? That’s the wrong word, but 
you know. Lots of media coverage, people around the body, that 
stuff. It felt like the wrong idea... until. Right up until our artsy fartsy 
friend Jai informed us of something very interesting. 


As soon as we could, we packed up and headed out. Jerry gave 
us... more than a couple scares, but we were otherwise a weirdly 
happy bunch. Never had we ever been so excited to know of 
someone dying from lymphoma. 


Now we were on the road to Florida, ready to kidnap the corpse of 
Bob Ross. 


8: Getting the Hotel Hots 


New Smyrna Beach was thankfully pretty small, as far as cities go. 
Only about 25,000 inhabitants. Sending Jerry into a couple of stores 
to do our bidding, we cobbled together money and rented a motel 
room. It was very small, because Jerry was the only person 
expected to be in there, but we made it work. Messing with the 
cushioned chair we made a bed for somebody on the floor. We took 
one of the blankets off of the bed and gave it to the floor dwellers, 
who were (at this time) Rachael and Jerry. A couple of us thought 
we spotted cockroaches, there was a clear draft, and the lights 
flickered in an obnoxious fashion where you couldn’t quite make out 
what was going on but all your movements looked sort of 
holographic (but the place was cheap, and we weren’t really ina 
position to be choosers). We just knew this place wasn’t rich enough 
to have security cameras, and that was comforting enough for us to 
settle down and forget all its issues. 


While Rachael was using the shower of questionable cleanliness 
(we could swear that the water was not as transparent as it was 
supposed to be), us guys got to talking about stuff. You know, 
normal everyday guy stuff.