#viralsweek

When the bullet enters Hi’s brain, he shatters into pieces.

The only way Tory can explain it is that when they flare, when she pictures each of them in her head, they are like little golden glass lights, and she knows who each one is. Their thoughts and memories pulse there.

So when the Gamemaster fires his gun, Hi shatters before he hits the ground. His body drops with a dull thud, but everything else, everything he was or maybe still is, flies outwards through their heads and lodges into their brains.

Tory is staring numbly at his body on the ground a few minutes later as Kit tries to shield them all when she realises that the memory of falling into the sea off the coast of Morris Island is not her own. It feels like her own, lodged in there as firmly as any, but it’s Hiram’s.

She starts to scream and she doesn’t stop until they put her in the back of a car.

They put her next to Ben, which is probably a mistake because she thinks she wants to kill him right now.

She thinks that. Hiram, who appears to have taken up residence in her head, apparently does not, because when she sees his tear-streaked face she feels a wave of powerful affection that she knows is not her own.

“Ben,” she chokes out.

“He’s in my head,” Ben whispers. “Parts of him are in here.”

So she’s not going crazy.

“Mine too,” she murmurs back. “I remember being a toddler and falling off the jetty.”

“He hit his head.” Ben looks on the verge of tears. “I felt it. I know how it felt.”

Tory remembers Ben then, eight years old and round faced and pink cheeked. She knows as easily as she would any memory that it’s his birthday party and that they’re in Hi’s bedroom before they painted the walls, and that after this they went to play in the sand. She remembers that Shelton was ill.

“I’m so sorry,” Ben chokes. “Is he here? Does he know I’m sorry?”

“I don’t know what this is,” Tory says. She wants to claw it out, because it’s not hers, it’s something stuck in there like a tick that’s burrowed under the skin, but there’s nothing else left of Hi.

She looks out of the window and sees him. The storm is too severe for the police who have arrived to really secure the scene, but they haven’t moved him yet. He’s still lying in the road, blood pooling around his skull, eyes wide open.

They put Shelton in a different car. She can see the outline of him hunched over in his seat, trembling like a leaf. It’s impossible to tell whether it’s the shock of what’s just happened or if he has shards in his head too.

“My mom’s gonna be so mad,” she blurts out before she can even think about it, and then claps a hand over her mouth in shock, tears rising in her eyes.

“Tory?” Ben says uncertainly. “Are you-”

“That wasn’t-”

“That wasn’t you.”

“That’s what he would have said,” she whispers. “It just came out. I wasn’t even thinking about it.”

Ben’s horrified expression says it all.

Tory leans forward, hand still over her mouth. She feels sick. It was her speaking, but not her words. She can’t distinguish whether Hi spoke through her or whether it was simply what he would have said and the pieces that made him are now part of her, but she knows she had no control.

This is why she keeps her hand forcefully over her mouth even as Kit gets back into the car, face pale.

“Are you…” he starts, then seems to realise it’s a stupid question. “I’m so sorry, kids. Let’s get you to the hospital.”

I don’t like hospitals, Tory thinks to herself. Gramps died at the MUSC and the doctors were rude when I broke my wrist.

She feels an ache at the memory of losing this man who was not even her grandfather, and she throws up into the plastic bag at her feet.

-

At the hospital, they look for Shelton.

They know that Hi will be somewhere here too, in the morgue waiting for his parents to come, waiting for an autopsy that will confirm what they already know.

She tries not to think about him there. He’s not there, not really. She felt him leave his body before he hit the ground.

It’s only now, sitting in an uncomfortable plastic chair in a waiting room to talk to a trauma specialist, that she breaks.

It’s been easy to avoid up to now, in the shock and the dark, but Hiram is dead. He’s dead because of what she did, and what Ben did, and she’s never going to see him again.

If he is in her brain, he offers no reassurance. Maybe he’s mad at her. He deserves to be.

Shelton finds them within the hour. There’s blood on his sleeves and knees from where he had knelt at Hi’s side, tried to save him and got nothing in return.

“Was it worth it?” Shelton asks. “Was it worth everything you were trying to do?”

“No!” Ben looks appalled. “Shelton, no. I- I would do anything, if I could just go back in time-”

“You can’t.” Shelton’s voice is shaking. “I can’t forgive you for this. Either of you.”

He’s shaking like a leaf. When he reaches up to rub his chin, an unconscious gesture that she’s seen a thousand times, but never on Shelton, she knows without even having to ask, but she asks anyway.

“He’s in your head, isn’t he?”

Shelton nods tightly, eyes welling up.

“I don’t know how to feel,” he says hoarsely. “He’s gone. But he’s not.”

“What’s in your head?” Ben asks.

“A lot,” Shelton says shakily. “Weird, random memories. And I really want to see his stupid fucking cat.”

He sinks down into the seat between them and buries his head in his hands.

“What are we going to do?” he whispers. “What the hell are we gonna do?”

Tory realises, watching him cry, that she suddenly desperately wants to make a joke. Her brain is scrambling to think of something funny to say even before she thinks that this isn’t like her at all, that she would never joke in this moment.

She just doesn’t want to see them cry. She can’t bear it. All of a sudden, she’d rather drink poison than see them cry.

It’s not her.

She pushes that thought back as hard as she can, feels it fade and disintegrate in her mind, and wonders if she’s killed him again, if she’s killing him every time she represses him.

Their parents come to find them soon after. They’re all sobbing, holding their children close and exclaiming that they can’t believe it.

Ruth and Linus aren’t there. Tory misses them like her heart has been ripped out.

When they finally let everyone go home, she nearly walks up the path to Hi’s house before her own. She sees Ben and Shelton make the same mistake.

That night, Tory cries herself to sleep and keeps her lamp on, because suddenly she’s afraid of the dark.

The date was this: October 31st. The spookiest time of the year. Shelton had been easily frightened as a child, and he supposed he still was in some ways. He had an abiding fear of the dark, spiders, rollercoasters, and the texture of peas and grapes. Halloween wasn’t so bad anymore, though. It was mostly a celebration of the fantastical and the dead, and Shelton was well acquainted with both. When you could create zombies and destroy them just as easily, you had no cause to fear the walking dead anymore.

The facts were these: Shelton Devers had learned he could resurrect the dead when a dog was struck by a car in front of him. When he had reached out to touch the dog, it had gone from being dead to being alive. Sixty seconds later, a bobcat in the hill nearby would drop dead, though Shelton took longer to learn that rule. He was only ten, after all.

The rules were these: One touch from Shelton brought life from death. A second touch returned the being to death. If the being lived again for more than one minute, another being would drop dead. If Shelton had not resurrected a being, he could touch them with no complications. If he had resurrected a being and then touched them again, he would kill them instantly.

His past was this: The day he had resurrected the strange dog, his mother had had an aneurysm. He had brought her to life, and his neighbor Hiram’s father had dropped dead sixty seconds later. When his mother cupped his cheek to wipe his tears away, she had collapsed again, and could not be saved this time. Shelton had gone to boarding school on the mainland. Hiram had been moved away by his mother. The last time he saw Hiram alive was after their parent’s funerals. It was the one and only time they shared a kiss.

His present was this: Shelton was twenty-seven and owned an electronic repair shop. His abilities did not extend to reanimating dead phones with the touch of a hand, but his brains usually did the trick there. It was a living. His side gig was a little more unusual, but cash was cash.

His coworkers were these: Ben Blue helped Shelton keep the shop running and assist Tory Brennan on cases. Tory was a private investigator. Shelton saved her dog Cooper’s life the first time he ever used his powers. Both were certain that it was fate, though she saw the good in it more than he did. She could solve any case, thanks in no small part to her habit of sneaking Shelton into the morgue and having him ask murder victims who had killed them. He respected her drive for justice enough to work with her, though he wished desperately that they didn’t have to break the law so much. His objection to the current case she presented, however, had nothing to do with legality and everything to do with Shelton’s grief.

The case was this: Hiram Stolowitski had been murdered on the cruise ship SMS Pacific Princess and thrown overboard, his corpse washing up onto the nearby coast. There were no leads in the investigation. Tory, sniffing a potential payday, had tapped Shelton to wake him up and ask him who killed him.

“I don’t know, Tory.” Shelton had been mourning ever since he watched the news, and the last thing he wanted was to discuss this, even with his friends. They didn’t know that he had known Hiram.

She narrowed her eyes. “Did you know him?”

Damn her research. “As kids, yeah. We were neighbors.”

Tory sighed. “Look, I know this might be dragging some stuff up, but don’t you think he deserves justice?”

He did. More than Tory could know. Hiram’s father was inadvertently killed by Shelton’s magic, and now his life was cut short. Shelton owed it to him to catch his murderer.

So now Shelton was slipping away from Marcus Karsten, the sketchy funeral director that Tory was doing her best to distract, and into the room that held Hiram’s coffin. Staring at the plain coffin, he couldn’t help but think of the goofy Halloween decorations that they had passed on the drive. The garish spiderweb-covered coffins with a vampire or ghoul lurking inside. Ominous plastic tombstones. He and Hiram had gone trick-or-treating together ever since they could walk. It was Hiram’s favorite holiday.

He opened the lid and... and... 

He had never once cried upon discovering a body. With his mother, he had been shocked, and with every corpse he awakened he grew more and more desensitized to it. But now, looking at his boyhood friend, his eyes began to sting. 

They were grown-ups now, the both of them. Well, Shelton was. Hiram was now a corpse. Pretty good-looking for a drowning victim, actually, much less gruesome then he could have been. But still. Dead. No growing left for him. Just a body in a plain black suit, which Hiram would have hated if he could see it. It was possible Hiram had grown out of his outlandish outfits as a man, but Shelton doubted he would have chosen such a boring look over a Hawaiian shirt, or full medieval funeral regalia, or at least a snazzier suit.

When he was sure no tears would escape, Shelton set the timer on his watch for sixty seconds, then he reached out and brushed his fingers against Hiram’s cheek. Cold flesh bloomed warmed. Hiram inhaled, then opened his eyes. Hazel, like Shelton remembered. Then he sat up so suddenly that Shelton fell backwards in his attempt to avoid a forehead bump that would send Hiram back to death.

“What the hell?” Hiram looked around, then his eyes locked onto Shelton, still sprawled on the floor. “Shelton Devers?”

He recognized him. Right away. Shelton’s chest ached as he got to his feet. “Hi, Hi.”

That got a chuckle. “What’s going on?” Hi looked around. “Is this my rescue mission? Are you in the Coast Guard?”

The lump that had been lodged in Shelton’s throat ever since he had seen the news of his death got exponentially larger. “Can you tell me what happened to you?”

“I was at the vending machine, and my chips got stuck, so I was banging on the glass and then I stuck my arm inside the machine, and then I saw someone with a mask in the glass reflection, which was kind of like a horror movie, and then they put a plastic bag over my head and held it there until I passed out.” The familiarity of Hi’s mile-a-minute speech was bringing the tears back to Shelton’s eyes. “It was pretty scary, not gonna lie.” Hi looked down again at the coffin, eyes narrowing.

“Do you know who did it? Or why?” Time was ticking away on Shelton’s watch.

Hi shrugged. “I sang ABBA during karaoke earlier that night, and some of the hecklers got pretty heated. Might be worth investigating. Other than that, I don’t know.” He drummed the coffin lid. “I’m dead, aren’t I.” Not a question, but Shelton answered with a soft nod.

Hi groaned. “God, my mom is gonna be so insufferable. She kept pulling up statistics about the dangers of cruises and the open ocean or some bullshit. Now she’s gonna think her Facebook research was right for the rest of eternity.” 

“I’m sorry,” Shelton said, voice cracking just a bit. He wasn’t sorry for Hi’s mother, but for his death. And his father. And actually, yeah, his crazy mother, all alone now. Once Shelton sent Hi back to death. There were only a few seconds left.

He could kiss him once more, maybe, or at least give him a hug, whichever one felt more right. Shelton stepped close to Hiram, still perched inside of the coffin, steeling himself to end this.

Hi peered at his face. “Are you an angel?”

“Definitely not.” Shelton didn’t know what he was, but he knew what he wasn’t.

“Well, I didn’t believe in a hell. That means I can’t go there, right?”

Shelton meant to laugh, but it came out like a sob. “I hope not.”

“Well, it was good to see you, Shelton. Whatever this is, I’m glad you’re here.” The genuine smile that accompanied his words shattered something in Shelton’s chest. He reached forward and touched Hi’s chest. Over the shirt wasn’t a kill touch, he needed skin-to-skin contact for that, but Shelton could feel his heartbeat underneath his palm. He clung to that, to his life and his warmth, as Hi tipped his head back, his eyes interested.

Three seconds. Shelton leaned in, tilting his face towards Hi’s. 

Two seconds. Close enough to feel his warm breath, possibly his last breath. 

One second. He made a decision. Knew the inevitable consequence, knew there would be blood on his hands, knew that nothing could ever work out the way he wanted it too.

The event horizon. Shelton lurched backwards before his lips could touch Hi’s. They could never, ever touch one another again. Upstairs, a body dropped dead to the floor, but Shelton didn’t hear it over the ringing in his ears.

Hi was alive. Hi could stay alive. As long as they never touched skin to skin, Hi could live again.

“You okay?” Hi swung his legs out of the coffin and reached out to him. Shelton jumped back again.

“Don’t touch me!” he shouted, making Hi jump. Excitement and fear were racing through his veins, the adrenaline making his mouth tingle and skin feel electric. What had he done? “You’re not dead now, man. You’re alive. I brought you back.”

“Huh?” Hi looked more intrigued than confused. God, Shelton has missed him.

“I brought you back to life by touching you,” Shelton said. “But if we touch again, you’ll die again.”

Hi blinked, then looked out the window. “Is this a Halloween thing? Am I Frankenstein?” He snapped his fingers. “If you say that I’m actually Frankenstein’s monster, I swear to God I will kill us both. I was just dead, my head’s still fuzzy.”

“It’ll wear off.” Shelton was still a little teary, but he couldn’t help smiling. “Let’s figure out how to get you out of here.”

The future was this: Hiram was smuggled out of the funeral home in his own coffin, then they were driven home by Ben and Tory. Ben had figured out what Shelton had done the second he laid eyes on Hiram. Tory had known when the funeral director Marcus Karsten had dropped dead right next to her. Nothing against Hiram, but she was furious with Shelton. 

There were consequences. There were always consequences. Shelton had known that since the night his mother and Hiram’s father had died. There would always be secrets between them, and grief, and lives lived apart, and the absence of any physical comfort. There would always be sad smiles and hands held through rubber gloves and plastic-wrap kisses.

But for now, there was this: Hiram was alive, and in the backseat with Shelton, his eyes glued to the Halloween decorations outside. “Hey, can we go out tonight? I could be a bedsheet ghost. A sexy one. You could be my grim reaper.”

This could have been any old workday. It was, in fact, the exact workday Hiram had already gone to twice. He even kept the same bright red blazer, a little scared to deviate at this point. If any old thing could kill him now, it might be safest to stick with the same outfit. Red had been his lucky color once, though nothing about this bizarre time loop was very lucky.

It was another repeated day, another morning after the party that Hiram couldn’t escape. How many times had he died now? Ten? Eleven? Those fucking stairs in Tory’s building had caused at least half of the deaths.

He kept dying. He kept returning to his 20th birthday party. He kept waking up in Tory’s bathroom. He kept walking out and Cooper kept barking at him and Tory kept saying, “Easy, boy!” and Ella kept sneaking a bite of the cake.

He wasn’t just having an ugly drug trip, he’d confirmed that much. And a conversation with both a rabbi and his real estate agent uncle had proven that the building was not haunted, as much as you could prove something like that. His uncle had gotten him to confess what was happening, and then kindly, gently guided him into the car to drive him to the hospital to be admitted to the mental ward. Hi, in tears, had agreed that it was the right thing to do.

He and his uncle had died halfway there when a truck T-boned them. Hi woke up in Tory’s bathroom again.

Hi had only made it to Monday morning twice before now. He’d only made it to work once, and now he was headed back to the office. He hadn’t yet been hit by a car or fallen into the sewer, so maybe he was finally, finally lucky. 

Yeah, he’d definitely just jinxed it. Shit.

Ben the bodega guy lazily returned Hi’s wave as Hi strolled past. Hi wondered if he should be keeping an eye on Ben, who didn’t know that he had been helping a drunk friend before Hiram’s first death, or had denied doing so before Hiram’s second death, or that he had then been with that friend again on the Monday morning before his fourth death. Ben wasn’t a very forthcoming guy, but Hi had never known him to lie, and he couldn’t accuse him and find answers when the offense had happened in a different reality. Still, Hi wondered if his lie meant that Ben knew something that Hi didn’t, or if Ben just didn’t want Hi in his business.

Banjo was out there somewhere, maybe with that weirdly handsome homeless guy, Chance (no way was that his real name), and they would maybe die without Hiram’s intervention. Chance had been bullied out of the homeless shelter, and Hi had hung out with him outside for the night two lives ago. They had fallen asleep on the concrete and frozen to death in a freaky April cold flash, which was tied with dying with his uncle as Hi’s most fucked-up death yet.

As weirdly insightful as Chance had been, he could offer no answers for Hi’s condition, and Hi was scared to approach him again for fear of killing him once more. He had to be missing something. Was his last real, non-looped night the key? 

He had been miserable at his birthday party but acted normal for the sake of Tory, Ella, and their other friends. He had left early with the handsome, sketchy hacker Eddie Chang, stopping first for cigs, snacks, condoms, and to check for Banjo at the bodega. Later, after Hi had finished up with Chang and semi-politely kicked him out, he had gone out again to search for Banjo, finding her with Chance in what would be their first encounter. On his way home, he had been hit by a taxi. Hi then had woken up in the bathroom of the party. And so it began.

His mother had smothered him past the breaking point for seventeen years of his life. He’d acted recklessly in retaliation and moved out as soon as possible. Years after leaving, he was still acting out. Hell, he’d been acting recklessly at his party, smoking mysterious substances (ketamine, apparently?) and hooking up with Chang of all people. And now he couldn’t stop dying. Had Ruth somehow known this would happen? Was that why she had been paranoid to the point of delusion?

Hi entered his work building and beelined for the escalator. Even before his new stair phobia, he had not once walked up to the fifteenth floor.

The escalator was crowded. A short, skinny guy with glasses was squeezed in next to Hi, fidgeting with something that drew his eye. A flash drive. One with a familiar logo, the kind that Eddie Chang used for his clients.

People got off and got on at the fifth floor. The eighth. They were between the eleventh and twelfth floor when the power cut off, leaving only the dim red emergency lights. The elevator made a horrifying metal screech.

Shit. Hi had jinxed it after all. Note to self: stairs being hazardous does not make elevators safe. In his next life, he would have to stay on ground floors at all times. Or maybe just refuse to leave his stupid birthday party. Wait for a gunman to barge in or for the ceiling to collapse on top of him and kill him again.

Several people had screamed when the lights went out. Everybody screamed when the elevator jolted. Everybody except for Hiram and Flash Drive Man, who just rolled his eyes when the car began to plunge downwards

Intrigued by the nonchalant approach to their certain deaths, Hi caught his eye. “Didn’t you get the memo? We’re all about to die.”

The red emergency light reflected off the man’s glasses and rendered his smooth skin luminescent. Hi looked nothing like this guy, but he recognized those haunted eyes and the resigned set to his jaw. It was how Hi looked every time he came back to Tory’s bathroom and stared at himself in the mirror. Even the guy’s shrug was tired. “It doesn’t matter, man. I die all the time.”

Hiram would find Flash Drive Man again after this. Learn all of his secrets, share a few of his own, find out just how entangled their lives were. Flash Drive Man was Shelton Devers; was Bodega Ben’s drunk friend, Eddie Chang’s boyfriend (oops), and stuck in a time loop that was inextricably connected to Hi’s. They always died at the same time. They always came back to the same place. Kindred spirits in a time warp, experts at self-sabotage. 

Hi didn’t know this yet, but he smiled at Shelton for the first time in several rebirths. “Me too.”