Hellish, this blast of heat that engulfed her, inflaming her skin, assaulting her senses inside and out. Karla felt an urgent need to inflate her lungs beyond the habitual sort of breathing many denizens of Deeps opted to do.
But there were colors all around her now. The pink had drained from the sky, replaced by a misty blue. A sea of green and growing things swarmed the hills around them.
She choked on the steamy air, coughing and sputtering. James gently patted her back.
“Don’t worry. It gets better. You just need to adjust.”
“Where are we? Is this … Heaven?”
“Nah,” said James, his face expressionless, almost grim. “It’s Dartmouth.”
They lay sprawled in the wreckage of some sort of heavily-damaged athletic facility. Lights blue and red flashed all around them. Radios chattered with numbers and jargon.
Men carrying clear shields and bulky suits maneuvered carefully through heaps of twisted medal littering a football field. Other groups of men, in helmets with tinted face plates and all black body armor waited beyond a perimeter marked by yellow plastic ribbon. A row of emergency vehicles, the source of the flashing lights, waited on the street behind them.
James crawled over to the prone figure of a young woman, dark smears streaking her dirty blonde hair.
“What happened to her?” said Karla, alarmed.
“She was a friend of mine,” said James, as he brushed the hair out of the woman’s eyes. “We were deported together.”
“Deported? So this is—?”
“New Hampshire,” said James. “America.”
“But … who did all this?”
“It’s complicated,” said James. “It was partly a drug cartel, and partly a Frelsian assassin named Wendell … and me.”
“So this is why you had to go back.”
James pulled open the door of a partially toppled shack riddled with bullet holes, every window shattered. He crawled inside and retrieved a plastic sack containing various items of clothing, all littered with broken glass.
“Here. Put some of these on. You may be warm now, but it wears off quick. Better you look presentable for jail.”
“Jail? But what did I do?”
“You’re here. An EU citizen in America illegally. At the scene of a crime. I’m surprised they haven’t tackled us already. They must be afraid of bombs or something.”
Already, the air seemed not quite as warm. She smelled lilacs. A tremor shuddered through her. A revelation.
“James. Don’t you realize what this means? I’m … we’re alive!” She chuckled. “I’ve come back to life. Reincarnated … as myself!”
“Yeah. So?” That face. So glum.
“This is impossible.”
He sniffed. “You should know better than that.”
He reached down and adjusted the young woman’s head so it was a little less grotesquely askew and aligned in a position that would have been more comfortable, if comfort had mattered to her anymore. Her death had really gotten to James. This … stranger. How long could they have known each other?
“What was her name?” said Karla, pulling on a pair of dark green sweat pants she had found in the bag of clothes.
“Ellen.”
