When she unexpectedly dies, Mackenzie Bowen lacks the paperwork she needs to pass into The Beyond. To avoid sitting in a waiting room for centuries, Mack is paired with Leon, a miserable Reaper, and hopes to either undo her death or earn her spot be...
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Okay, so we all have bad days.
We get up late.
We miss the bus.
We forget to brush our teeth, put on matching socks, or grab our wallets when we're racing out the door.
And, sometimes, we get run over by ambulances when we're crossing the street on the way to important job interviews and are reduced to bloody smears on the road.
What I'm trying to say is that, if bad days had a scale of one to ten, mine was somewhere around an eleven.
Maybe eleven and a half.
The irony of the manner of my death wasn't lost on me.
The sound of wailing sirens approaching normally meant—at least in my mind—that some heroic paramedics were on their way to save the life of some poor soul in dire need of their help. It had seldom meant oh-shit-that-looks-like-it's-driving-right-at-me. Yet, that was exactly the thought that occupied my mind in my final moments.
Okay, that's not true.
It was actually, "Fuck."
When death bears down upon you, shrieking, cutting through traffic, and going way over the speed limit, you don't have a lot of time to create eloquent thoughts. It is literally: Fuck. Smack. Dead. Then there's all the screaming and stuff because, you know, people react when they see someone get turned into jam in a busy street.
Thanks to the invention of the smartphone, my death was on YouTube within minutes. I never got to find out just how many hits that video got, but I imagined it was in the high thousands.
Hell, maybe it went viral.
I was probably a clickbait article already.
Girl gets hit by ambulance; you'll never guess the one crazy thing that happened next.
Well, I could.
Death.
I just saved you from a hundred pop-up ads. You're welcome.
Although I was pretty much dead at the scene, the paramedics did still try to save me. Honestly, it was the least they could do after killing me. Well, the least they could have done was to leave me there and skip the country, but I appreciate they stopped and attempted to do something about it. It was like one of those medical TV shows with the patient being strapped to a gurney and all that jazz, except I was the patient, and I wasn't curled up on the sofa with my sister, making her watch all the gross gory parts. The journey to the hospital was a lot of me coming back for a few seconds, giving my would-be rescuers a flash of hope, and then sticking up the metaphorical finger before I crashed out again. I couldn't pinpoint the precise moment when I decided I was tired of that game and tuned out of the world, but it had to be before we reached our destination.
My family weren't waiting for me when we arrived. It takes time for people to be contacted when someone is alone and needs to be identified. There are all kinds of checks to be done, questions to be asked, and tough conversations to be had. I was long gone by the time my family wept in dramatic soap opera fashion all over my body.
