January 7, 2018- I Need a Doctor

“I Need a Doctor” Dr. Dre (featuring Eminem and Skylar Grey) from Em’s Odds and Sods, A Collection

On Tuesday they discovered the third body. Third in as many weeks. This one had the distinction of being the first cremated.

Robert Jokah, the son-in-law of the deceased heard a crash approximately 1:14 AM and went downstairs to check the noise. A voice assured him that, “I was just being clumsy.” Satisfied that Caroline, his wife and daughter of the deceased had knocked something over on her way back in from a ladies’ trivia night, he went back upstairs and went to sleep. Caroline came to bed sometime after that—“later than I expected” reported Robert—and he mumbled something to her about it taking her a long time. Not knowing what he was referring to, Caroline decided he was speaking nonsense in his mostly asleep state and ignored it. It was only the next morning when the diner called that the two checked the urn downstairs to find it broken on the living room floor.

Meanwhile, the deceased, one Greta Doone, had shown up for her diner shift at 6 AM. Some 5 days after she had died of a cardiac event during a West Brewster Church of the Risen Bingo Night.

Greta joined William Vick—dead by head trauma after attempting to ski, while intoxicated, down a black diamond slope after the mountain had closed—and Crystal Wiley—dead by an undiagnosed genetic heart defect as the formerly dead now returned to life.

Unlike Doone, both had been intact at the time of their bodies’ apparent disappearances. Vick was in the morgue waiting a full autopsy to confirm hypothesized cause of death and Wiley had been buried in a green ceremony. Like Doone, they could vaguely remember their deaths, remember a time of not being alive, but could not recall the transitions between the two states of being nor their return to life. Their recollections of life after death were somewhat incomplete as well but what they could recall, they did with surprising detail including smell, taste, sound, and more.

They were not zombies, it seems important to mention. For one, zombies as most understand them are fictional creations that came into popularity in the movie Night of the Living Dead, despite the fact that no one called them zombies in that film. For another, the three that have returned so far breathe. They have heart rates. They need to eat and drink They bleed when cut. And they have no hunger for human flesh.

In some ways, Claudia French and Aaron Jones would have preferred they be zombies. Sure, those were mindless killing machines, but at least it would be an answer. Instead, they had three resurrected people—one of whom had literally been burnt to ash port-mortem—who could vaguely recall death and some kind of afterlife but now walked amongst us once more. Nothing connected them except a vague geographical closeness and the apparent defeat of mortality.

Nonetheless, French and Jones met Doone at the Full Stop Diner immediately after shift in the hopes she might have some key heretofore unrevealed detail that would spread the rest of the case out in front of them.

Unfortunately, Greta had no one such magical puzzle piece to provide. Like the others , she was pleasant and open to answering questions. But also, like the others, she had largely no insight or information to offer. She could only smile, call it a miracle, and politely refuse the idea of reporting to a government facility for more intensive testing.

However, when Jones went to pay the check, the older woman leaned across the table and gestured for French to do the same. When the officer did so, Doone whispered, eyes suddenly wild, words tumbling quickly from between her lips, “There are three more to come. When six have returned so too will the Focal Point. And then our connection will become known.”

Claudia responded quickly, trying to tamp down her suddenly rising panic, “Please, just tell us the connection. Let us help you.”

“We are not the ones who will need help,” Greta replied, almost smugly.

Then without another word, the older woman rose from the table and departed before Jones returned from paying the check. French kept the “prophecy” to herself, feeling as though, somehow, she could not even manifest the words to share with her partner. Jones took her explanation for Greta’s quick leave—that the waitress was tired after a long shift and all the excitement and simply needed to get home and rest—at face value and there was no value in discussing it further.

Four hours later, they would receive another call. An hour up the road, a 48 year old man by the name Glen Dogravich interrupted his company’s board meeting to ask if anyone knew why his password no longer let him log onto his computer. The members were quite stunned. The meeting, after all, was to name a new CEO as Dogravich—the previous holder of that title—had died in a car accident 5 days earlier.

Glen made four. Only two to go.