Intrinsical - Lani Woodland [59]
It was morbid.
I thought back to the ghost stories my grandma had told me about murdered spirits stuck in a homicidal loop, reliving their deaths every night. I gulped, hoping that wasn’t about to happen to me. I didn’t have time to worry over this because a loud crack thundered through the air and everything went black.
****
Empty. I was nothing. No name, no sense of self, beyond and before this moment I was nothing. A heavy rhythm thudded around me as I was rocked, my limbs hanging uselessly from me.
In a rush my body and spirit were reunited. I was underwater in my heavy gown and impractical shoes. I was trapped and running out of air, drowning. I had heard when you’re dying, images of your life flitter past your eyes, but for me pictures of my evening trudged through my mind: Cherie’s dinner party at the old pool; sharing juice with Brent; being thrown from my body; trying to reconnect; Brent vanishing after the orange explosion underwater. My heart wilted with panic as I struggled to free myself from what held me captive, dragging me to the bottom of the pool. I peered into liquid darkness that seemed insistent on claiming me as it own, despite my frantic clawing and tugging at my dress. There was a clanging in my ears, a burning in my chest. I wasted my last few seconds of breath screaming futilely for help that I knew wouldn’t come. Terror morphed into acceptance. My eyes started to close in defeat, my limbs stilled, and I knew it was the end.
Some time later my eyes opened slowly. The warped, disorienting feeling of déjà vu still clung to me. I was lying on cement, on my back, looking through the glass roof of the pool house, staring at the stars. My shoulder burned, throbbing from the mist’s handiwork. I was back in the present, my memory intact, the instant replay of my death over.
I had been ripped from the present to experience again the final moments of my life. Reliving my death had been just as traumatic and painful as it had been when I had really died. In the reenactment, I had been powerless to remember anything beyond my final moments or do anything to change the outcome.
I turned to tell Brent but to my surprise he wasn’t there. The last place I had seen him had been at the volleyball courts when the mist . . .
Did it get him? I started to get to my feet, but had to sit down as the room began to careen. I thought of the mist attack.
My mind searched for him with an intensity that surprised me. He was near and just knowing that eased the pressure building behind my eyes. But beyond knowing he was close, I couldn’t locate him, my Brent GPS on the fritz. The scraping of the door and the flickering on of the lights drew my attention to Cherie walking into the pool house, blocking the view of the person behind her. She wore the same formal black and white dress that she had worn at her party the night before.
“I swear I saw them come in here,” Cherie mumbled. “He left, but she didn’t.”
Her words were familiar; I had heard them from her before, the night before. Her companion stepped out from behind her and my forehead crinkled in confusion to see it wasn’t Steve with her, but Brent.
“Nice to know you’re able to pay such good attention to details and kiss me at the same time,” Brent teased with a grin. He glanced around the room, looking right past me, even though I was looking right at him. “Maybe they left,” he suggested.
The words, his actions, even his expressions were identical to the ones Steve had used right before they found me dead. Brent was acting like Steve had, and was even wearing Steve’s navy blue pin-striped suit.
“I guess,” Cherie said, sounding unsure. “Wait, what’s that?”
Cherie asked, pointing to the water’s edge where my purse lay haphazardly.
Cherie bent down and picked it up. “It isn’t like Yara to leave things. You don’t think . . .” She trailed