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  Dying Day

  a Dying for a Living novel

  Kory M. Shrum

  Copyright © 2017 Kory M. Shrum

  All rights reserved.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is purely coincidental.

  No reproduction of this work is allowed without the author’s written permission.

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  Table of Contents

  Author’s Note

  Prologue

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Epilogue

  Other Novels by Kory M. Shrum

  About the Author

  Bonus Content

  -Post-Finale Interview

  -Dying Day Deleted Scenes

  -Character Interviews

  -Life’s a Gas

  -Death or Something Like It

  -Original Draft of Dying for a Living

  -Preview of Shadows in the Water

  Author’s Note

  This is the seventh and final installment in the Dying for a Living series. Just writing that sentence makes my breath catch. For those of you who don’t know, Dying for a Living was my first novel.

  Jesse Sullivan was the first character who came to me, alive and in full-color, through the illuminated fog of my imagination. She was the first clear voice I heard in a mind full of such voices. So there is something incredibly, and surprisingly, bittersweet about ending her tale. Even though I knew how this series would end the moment I wrote Chapter 1 on August 25, 2008, it’s strange to finally arrive here.

  I want to thank all of the readers who were here with me from page one. Thank you for reading. Thank you for listening. Thank you for making room for Jesse and Ally and their many friends in your hearts and minds. And while I plan to write many, many more stories over the coming years, Jesse will always be my first joy and heartbreak. Just as you will always be my first readers.

  You’re both more precious to me than I can say.

  Happy reading.

  Kory

  Shame on us

  Doomed from the start

  May God have mercy

  on our dirty little hearts

  Shame on us

  For all we’ve done

  And all we ever were

  just zeros and ones.

  —Nine Inch Nails, “Zero Sum”

  I will

  tear it down

  to the ground

  and build another one

  —How to Destroy Angels, “And The Sky Began to Scream”

  Prologue

  Daniel Phelps’ fingers are so cold he thinks they’ll fall off, snapping like icicles from the rain gutter. He positions his feet in the frosty grass, liking the way it crunches under his sneakers, even if the cold has weaseled its way through the canvas and his thick socks to nip at his toes. White breath billows in front of his face with each exhale, but he ignores all of this. He concentrates on the dusty baseball in his right hand. He throws it high. It pulls to the right. On the other side of the lawn, his uncle opens a battered brown glove and catches the ball with a grimace.

  “That’s your third wide pitch. You want to quit?” Uncle Paul calls out. His own breath is white smoke in front of his eyes. He lifts his John Deere cap from his head and scratches the scalp underneath. He rotates his shoulder clockwise in its socket, the Carhartt jacket lifting and falling with the movement.

  “I’m fine,” Danny insists. He isn’t going to let something as stupid as a burning arm rob him of this chance. Baseball tryouts are Friday, and Danny intends to spend every free moment between now and the two o’clock meetup on the pitch, warming up for it. He’s gotten up at 5:30 every day this week to throw with Uncle Paul.

  His uncle looks at his watch. “We’ve got time for a few more. It’s just past seven.”

  Time. Time before the school bus with a patched tire picks him up at the end of the driveway. Time before Uncle Paul takes his own truck into town and works ten hours at the cereal plant doing whatever it is a foreman does there. Time before Aunt Jody appears in the door smiling with their tin box lunches in hand.

  That part of their morning routine always makes Danny a little sad. It makes him miss his mother, dead for almost two years now, and makes him miss his big sis Jesse, too. He hasn’t talked to Jesse in months, and he isn’t sure he’s ever going to talk to her again.

  Every time Jesse’s face blasts across the evening news, Uncle Paul and Aunt Jody change the channel or send him on some needless errand out of the room. Danny, will you check the mail, buddy? Danny, I think I left my car windows down, and it’s supposed to rain. Danny, can you go make sure the shed is locked up good and tight?

  Once, he asked his aunt and uncle if they thought Jesse would be okay. They’d exchanged a look over their plates of roast beef and mashed potatoes before Aunt Jody said, “I’m sure it’s all just a misunderstanding, sweetie. They’ll sort it out.”

  This was pretty big of her, because Aunt Jody doesn’t like what the TV calls “zombies.” Those people like his sister who can die but come back to life. Some of them work as death replacement agents, saving people, actually dying for them—which Danny thinks is about the coolest job in the world—even if people are creeped out by it.

  Danny was surprised to find that the kids at Lincoln Middle School didn’t think his sister’s job was cool. They’d reacted with sneers and cruel taunts when he first told them. One boy even shoved him into a locker and called him zombie lover, asking him, so you like your cunts cold? He knew what the c-word meant. Some of the older boys talked like that, and made fun of him because he didn’t. You sound like a librarian, Phelps.

  When he goes to Lincoln High next year for tenth grade, maybe it’ll be different. That school is three times as big and serves two whole counties instead of just their small town, Richboro, population 2,828.

  His uncle snaps back and releases the baseball. It sails past Danny and rolls down the hill behind him, toward the trees lining the driveway. Danny doesn’t even see it go by.

  His uncle barks a laugh. “What happened, Dan? Your brain short circuit?”

  Danny doesn’t answer.

  His eyes are fixed on the black swarm on the horizon. A mass unlike any he’s ever seen is rushing toward him, and with it a high-pitched whine that makes his flesh crawl along his bones.

  He steps toward it, mouth falling open.

  Birds. Danny realizes he’s looking at birds—hundr
eds, maybe thousands of birds—diving and flying as if Hell itself is on their tail feathers. Some of the birds collide with one another, and when they do, their talons come out, swiping and screeching, and they fall to Earth in a feathery ball of terrified rage.

  “Must be a storm,” his uncle says. But he doesn’t sound like he believes this himself. “Just a bad storm.”

  “What is that?” Danny murmurs. “Lightning?”

  He points at the strange ripple of purple electricity rolling across the sky. It spiderwebs like heat lightning, but this is February, not July.

  “Mother of God,” Uncle Paul says. “Get in the house.”

  Danny doesn’t move. He just stands there, neck craned back and staring.

  The purple light covers everything. It shimmers like fish scales, blotting out the sun and the clouds, giving the world a twilight hue. The pond, the yard with all those baseballs in the grass glow purple now. The house looks possessed, like something out of a horror movie, with the violet light collecting in its window glass.

  A BOOM cracking across the sky makes Danny turn and look back toward the horizon.

  The purple is changing. It’s turning orange. No. Not orange. It’s fire.

  The sky is on fire.

  The sky is on fire, and all Danny can do is look at it.

  He feels a rough hand seize the back of his neck and jerk him toward the house.

  “We’ve got to get indoors!” Uncle Paul begins dragging Danny after him. His sneakers stumble up the steps and into the house, and the door is slammed behind them.

  Aunt Jody screams. One hand goes over her heart, the other is clutching a knife coated with peanut butter poised over a slab of white bread. “Heaven’s sake, Paul. Is that really necessary?” She pulls the earbuds from her ear and glares at her husband. “I could’ve cut my finger off, and you’d have found a surprise in your sandwich.”

  Uncle Paul says nothing. He only pulls back the kitchen curtain to reveal the flaming sky.

  In the distance, an emergency siren begins to wail.

  *

  Officer Jeffers stops his police car in the center of 2nd Ave. He is a block from the Starbucks where his partner, Officer Gaul, waits with their coffee. Without thinking, he leans over and flips the switch that controls his flashing lights. The blue lights spring to life, splashing across the asphalt and brick-faced buildings lining the avenue. This does nothing to deter the looters. But if he is being honest with himself, Jeffers doesn’t give a damn about the looters.

  The swarms of ransackers crawl in and out of busted windows. Two men climb into the back of a battered red pickup with a sixty-inch flat screen between them. A gang of teenagers in denim jackets and hoodies run into the street laughing, arms full of iPads and Bose earphones. Even a petite woman in a pencil skirt and pristine white dress shirt wobbles to her car on unsteady red stilettos, holding a Keurig against her chest.

  A Keurig.

  None of them look at Jeffers or his patrol car in the center of the road. But several throw nervous glances up at the sky. Jeffers himself seems unable to look away from it. He doesn’t see his partner Gaul step out onto the sidewalk without their coffee. He only notices him when four or five green-aproned employees dart out of the Starbucks, each throwing a panicked glance at the sky before ducking into the parking garage across the street.

  Only then do the officers’ eyes meet, and Gaul begins to run toward his partner as one might run from gunfire: eyes as large as saucers, head ducked and covered by shaking hands.

  Some dull remnant of his training tells him to arm himself, tells him to prepare for the fight.

  Jeffers’ thumb reflexively unsnaps the leather strap holding his pistol in place at his side. But he doesn’t draw his gun. He has no target. The looters, sure, but the looters are not the problem.

  The sky is the problem.

  There was no training for this. No practice scenario. No drill.

  Officer Jeffers remains transfixed, staring at that sliver of sky between the tall buildings. It shimmers purple, warping and wavering as if the sky has turned from air to water, and impossibly, they are watching lavender waves slap against an invisible shore. They have become the shore.

  An explosion rocks the street, and orange flames leap from a storefront half a block down. People scream. Panic erupts as black smoke billows into the sky.

  “What is that? What the fuck is that?!” Gaul slaps the hood of the cruiser as if touching home base, as if a simple olly olly oxen free will save them all.

  *

  Kirk stands on the largest hill in the Mt. Olivet Cemetery and counts his blessings. At least it won’t rain.

  And it certainly won’t snow. Their Nashville winter has been too mild this year for snow.

  Kirk is grateful for this, because the only thing sadder than lowering an old friend into the earth is lowering an old friend into the earth while cold rain beats down. He is pleased with how the service has gone so far. Reverend Hanscomb has been solemn but kind, apparently sober for the occasion. Kirk detected no clue of the old man’s drinking except for the tremor in his hands whenever he repositioned the Bible in his palm and turned the page. Kirk doubts anyone will notice this, or if they do, they’ll mistake it for an old man’s tremor, not a drunk’s.

  But who is Kirk to judge? He’s getting quite close to “old man” himself these days. His stiff back, sore feet, and wandering mind tell him so.

  Of course, perhaps he should be grateful for the opportunity to grow old at all.

  Kirk turns and looks at a grave higher up on the hill, half hidden by the shade of the weeping willow that looms over it.

  No, not all of his friends will have the privilege of becoming an old man.

  A soft press on his arm makes him turn back. Mrs. Pamerson squeezes him again. “Morty looked real good, Mr. Kirk. Thank you so much for fixin’ him up so nice.”

  Kirk takes the back of the widow’s hand and kisses the knuckles. He does this gently, knowing that her arthritis has been unbearable for years now—so bad, in fact, that just looking at her twisted knuckles makes his own heart hurt. “It was my pleasure, Mrs. Pamerson. Morty was a good friend, and I try to do right by good friends.”

  Again, the urge to look over at the lone grave beneath the tree pulls at him. Is that true? Do you always do right by your friends?

  Mrs. Pamerson’s daughter Judy appears, and with a polite smile, separates her mother from the mortician and funeral director who helped lay her father to rest. The other mourners have already started down the hill, walking toward the palatial funeral home with its ionic columns and large, open black door. They’ll sip punch and eat cookies. The caterer will bring out the food in thirty minutes, leaving enough time for everyone to get a drink or two into their hands before it comes.

  But Kirk lingers despite the thinning crowd. He gives final instructions to the boys filling Morty’s grave with soft, overturned earth, and then he walks up the hill toward the grave weighing heavy on his mind. Legs burning, he steps beneath the enormous weeping willow. Its large roots protrude from the earth all around, and he steps over these carefully in his polished loafers.

  He kneels before the grave, daring to put one knee of his dress slacks on the cold earth. But what are dress slacks when compared to honoring a good friend? He places a hand on the frosty stone as one might place their hand on the head of a child.

  James T. Brinkley. Veteran and friend.

  We’ve got to help her, Brinkley had said. Lord, how many years ago was that? Brinkley had stood in Kirk’s office right here at Mt. Olivet with that battered leather jacket slung over one shoulder.

  I need your help, Randall. You know I wouldn’t ask if I didn’t. Since he left the military, he’d had a quiet life and liked it that way. When Brinkley walked into his office with a favor, it was like his old life had caught up to him, and he wasn’t sure he was happy about that. But Brinkley had done right by him—more than once.

  So even though Kirk had never w
orked on anyone with NRD before, he accepted the challenge. He went to the seminars and took the accreditation class. He shopped for the cosmetics made special for girls like Miss Jesse. He did it all, because he knew how much his friend cared about this girl, and he knew his friend must’ve had his reasons for helping her.

  They’re the most vulnerable when they’re dead, Brinkley had told him, and I can’t just trust anyone with her. But I trust you.

  And was that trust worth it? Kirk wonders. He isn’t sure. Part of him believes that he will always be the young, dumb kid who took a bullet in the thigh because he never knew where to look for the enemy.

  “Did I help you?” Kirk asks, feeling his throat go tight. “Did I do enough?”

  Because Brinkley is dead, and Jesse is gone.

  But he is still here. He is still right here.

  Kirk pinches his brow, and squeezes his eyes shut. And this is the truth of it.

  It’s hard to survive.

  It is harder to be the last one standing, leave the people you love behind and somehow get up every morning, eat, sleep, and look in the mirror at his aging face without asking, why not me? Why not me?

  With a sigh, Kirk stands from the grave, knees popping, and brushes one hand over his slacks. He starts down the hill toward the house. He can smell the food, even a good fifty feet from the funeral home’s closed door.

  Twenty feet from the black lacquered door, a crack resounds across the sky. If Kirk didn’t know better, he would have guessed someone broke the sound barrier, and the BOOM echoing over his head was a sonic blast assaulting the Nashville atmosphere.

  Kirk searches the sky, heart pounding, but sees no aircraft. No contrails in the sky.

  He sees only fire. For an instant, it looks like purple lightning, but then the lightning gives way almost immediately to bright orange flame, separating them from the space above. He guesses the bright shimmering shield must be higher than the highest planes.