The Past and Other Things That Should Stay Buried(46)

“Dino!”

He snorts and rolls over, covering his face with his arm.

“It made the news,” I say. “Get up.”

“One night. I just want one night of sleep,” Dino moans. “Is that too much to ask? One night where I don’t have to babysit or dig up a corpse. Please?”

“Quit whining.” I grab a book off his desk and toss it at him.

“Ow!” he says. “That was only my knee.”

“And it was only a book. Not even a hardcover, so quit complaining.”

Dino tosses aside his comforter and sits up. Wearing only boxers and socks, he looks so spindly and breakable, but, and I’ll never tell him this, the boy’s tougher than he appears.

“You have to see this,” I say.

“Pee first, then talk.” He disappears into the bathroom. I forgot how grumpy he is when he wakes up. I’ve got so many videos of him shambling through my house first thing in the morning with his eyes glued shut, stumbling into walls and trying not to stab anyone while my mom yammers at him. When I wake up, my brain and body fire from sleep to wake immediately, but Dino needs a solid hour to warm up before he’s anywhere near coherent.

Dino returns ten minutes later with a glass of orange juice.

“Thought you were going to the bathroom?” I ask.

He glares at me and sits down in his bed with his juice, sipping it slowly. His eyes are only half-open, and his hair is an overgrown garden.

I doubt he’s going to get any more receptive than this for a while, so I launch straight into it. “There’s a story about how no one’s dying.”

“Okay.”

“A nurse in Rhode Island was the first to notice it, so she called a couple of nearby hospitals, and it spread from there.” I check to make sure Dino’s paying attention and hasn’t fallen asleep again. He’s a master at dozing with his eyes open. “Guess when the last death was?”

“The night you rose from the dead to torment me?” Dino says in a deeply annoyed monotone. The first fingers of light are crawling up the sky and brightening the room, but they only seem to darken Dino’s mood.

“Correct. Best estimates place the last recorded death in Ankara, Turkey around the time I literally scared the piss out of you.”

“I didn’t literally wet my pants.”

“Sure you did.”

“I was wearing them. I’d remember.”

“Whatever,” I say. “In my memory of that moment, you were standing in a puddle.”

Dino sips his OJ. “No surprise there. We’ve already proven your memory of events is basically crap.”

“What’s that—” I stop myself. Wag my finger at him. “Nope. You’re not dragging me into a fight to avoid talking about this.”

“Talking about what?”

“That the world is falling apart and it’s my fault.” I wait for some smartass retort, but he’s got nothing to say. “Here’s how I’m thinking about it: There are two possible explanations—well, there might be more, but I’m focusing on the two that make the most sense to me. The first is that something suspended death. Folks can’t die anymore. As a side effect of that, I’m also not-dead, but not not-dead in the way that those others are. They can’t die, but I was already dead. The second possibility is that somehow I returned from the dead, and in doing so short-circuited death itself, making it so that no one can die until I die. Again.”

Dino got more sleep than he thinks, which left me with a lot of time to consider the various explanations.

“What about—”

“I’m not finished,” I say. “Now, if the first explanation is true, why did it affect me? Shouldn’t there be others like me waking up? Folks who are recently dead? Yes, there should be. But there aren’t. You’ve got a fresh body in the freezer that hasn’t so much as twitched a finger. I would know. I watched him for ten minutes before I got in there with him. So what’s more likely: that some worldwide phenomenon suspended death and also returned to something-like-life one single corpse among the hundreds of billions of corpses buried on this planet, or that some miracle brought me back, which had the side-effect of pausing death for everyone else?”

Dino opens his mouth to speak, but closes it without a word. His eyes look a little wider, a little more alert, but he’s still struggling through the morning fog in his brain. After a minute of quiet he says, “Actually, that makes sense.”

“Ha!”

“Ha?”

“Told you the world revolved around me.”

“Thank God I only have to hear you gloat about this for the rest of your not-life, which will hopefully be short.”

I do a little dance in my chair. It’s not particularly dignified, but I don’t care.

“So what do we do?” Dino asks.

“Do?”

Dino shrugs. “If we assume that your reanimation is the cause of the . . .”

“Miracle.”

“Really?”

“That’s what they’re calling it in the news,” I say.

Dino raises his eyebrows and shakes his head. “Yeah, they won’t be calling it that for long.”

“Then let’s use it ironically.”