Forever After - By David Jester Page 0,14

stood up, straightened his jacket, smiled appreciatively and turned to leave.

Doctor Khan called to him before he exited the room: “And lay off the dope.”

3

On the night of his death Michael had experienced the same contented sobriety that he had since glimpsed in the eyes of so many of the recently deceased.

That night, when the final rain drop splattered on his pale face and his soul slipped out of his body, he felt empty. He felt like he was the body his soul had left, and not the other way around.

The man who had spoken to him before his death and then watched him die, extended a hand.

“Samson,” he offered with a smile.

Michael looked at the proffered appendage and then at his own lifeless body. “I’m dead?”

Samson withdrew his hand, tucking it into his jacket. “I’m afraid so.”

“You knew this was going to happen?”

Samson nodded apologetically.

“So what now?” Michael clambered to his feet and looked around the dim alleyway. There were no bright lights at the end, no ethereal melodies. “Is this it?”

“It doesn’t have to be if you don’t want it to be,” Samson said cryptically. “That’s what I’m here for. My offer still stands.”

Michael took a step back and rested a hand on his forehead. Dying and then being offered a job was a lot to take in at once, but what bothered him was that he wasn’t stressing out over it; his conscious had been sedated.

“Does it always feel like this?” He asked. His eyes picked out the glinting police lights in the distance as they sparkled against the freshly fallen rain. “Death, I mean.”

“I guess so,” Samson said.

Michael turned to the older man. “You don’t know? Didn’t you die?”

Samson shrugged. “Technically I’m dead. But I didn’t die.”

“I don’t understand.”

“It’s not important.” Samson carefully stepped over Michael’s dead body and put an arm around the shoulder of his living one. “Come with me,” he said.

They walked out of the alleyway and into the street where the rain beat a staccato rhythm on the road and the streetlights spilled their sickly glow onto the pavement.

They walked slowly past the closed shops, quiet bars and simmering houses. Beyond the pub where old alcoholics drank their sorrows away; the nightclubs where the young danced and drugged the night away. They passed a beggar on the street who looked up at them both, shook a tin cup that rattled with the lonely sounds of a solitary coin, and then groaned when they passed by unsympathetically.

They walked for ten minutes before Samson spoke again. “You like this part of town?”

Michael laughed scornfully. “It’s a fucking dive. Never seen anything so disgusting in my life.” As if to add emphasis to his statement a short fat man stumbled out of a pub further up the road with an empty pizza box in his hand. He vomited all the way down his jumper with the ease and comfort of a baby, then, finding the pizza box empty, he began to tuck into the vomit; mistaking it for spilt pizza topping. “We come here for a bit of down-an’-out,” Michael added, sneering at the drunken man who had now stumbled into the street, still chewing on a slice of regurgitated pepperoni. “A laugh. A rumble. A slag.”

“You know these streets well though.”

“I guess so.”

Samson nodded as if he already knew.

They crossed onto the bridge which marked the West end of the town, things became a little brighter on the other side, the council estates turned into middle-class suburban homes for the blue collared workers of the district.

There was someone waiting ahead of them in the middle of the bridge, his attention on the blackness below, his head hung low. Michael watched him until he felt Samson’s hand gently squeeze his shoulder.

“This is the deal Michael,” he said, stopping him. “I give you immortality. I give you another life, an infinite one. I give you a job, a reasonable pay. You give me your commitment and dedication.”

Michael nodded, waiting for more.

“What do you say?” Samson asked.

“What job?” Michael asked. “I don’t understand, what do I do? Where do I do it?”

“You collect the souls of the dead. Like I did with you tonight.”

“Like the grim reaper?”

Samson smiled broadly. “Something like that, but there isn’t just one Grim Reaper, there are thousands in this country alone.”

“So why do you need me?”

“I need you here.” He opened his arms around him, gesturing to the town as a whole. “I need you to work Brittleside.”

“You’re shitting me.”

Samson slowly shook