Alex shot him in the back, and the bassist lurched twice before hitting the floor.

"Why didn't you stop him?" Alex yelled at the remaining two.

"You told us to stop!" the drummer answered.

"Shut up!" Alex shot the drummer, then the guitarist.

Val, Amy, and a rosy-cheeked young man in mechanic's overalls were the last living customers. The three huddled beside an empty beer keg. "Don't hurt us," the mechanic pleaded.

"It doesn’t hurt. Watch this." Theatrically, Alex held the barrel against his outstretched left palm. The trio whimpered in fear, and Alex shushed them. Then he took a deep breath and pulled the trigger. The blood spattered the trio and the beer keg. Alex suppressed a yell: not a yell of pain, though the pain was enormous, but a yell of elation.

He held his hand in the air, holding it at an angle so the overhead fluorescent lights highlighted the bloody hole in his hand.

Val and Amy fainted.

"You try it." Forefinger extended through the trigger lock, Alex dangled the gun before the mechanic.

"I don't like guns," the mechanic insisted, eyes clamped shut. Alex fired.

The bullet left a hole beside the mechanic's nose; Alex mused that the hole resembled a third nostril. Alex leaned over the mechanic’s face and sucked the blood from his head. In his excitement—the destroyed bar with its shattered chairs and spattered blood made him manic—Alex sucked hard enough to draw out the bullet from the kid’s face.

Alex dragged Lee's corpse next to Val, fit Lee's fingers around his pistol, and pushed the barrel into Lee's mouth.

"It doesn’t hurt," Alex whispered.



Alex was in a Muskegon hotel room when the afternoon TV news carried a story of an "apparent suicide/multiple murder" in northern Gratiot County.

"Gratiot County sheriff Chief Jonathan Snively-Goodheart announced that Lee Howell of Gratiot County apparently beat and shot several people in Cal Clyde's Elks Lounge and NiteSpot, then turned the gun on himself. Chief Snively-Goodheart speculates, however, that Howell may have shot the others and then tried to burn down the tavern before killing himself. Much of the interior was burned, and investigators are struggling to cope with the extensive fire and smoke damage." An early morning shot of the Nitespot appeared. Six trucks were parked outside. Smoke escaped from a broken window, blending with the morning fog. A brief shot of the inside showed the blackened chairs, tables, and bar.

Alex laughed, joy welling from deep within him. He’d not felt so confident and vigorous in years. Last night’s blood had been marvelous…miraculous, really. The mechanic had certainly been in youth’s wonderful bloom. Alex opened a notebook and, to his enormous relief, the ideas flowed from pen to paper. He mapped out a fiction in the guise of autobiography, in which a man returns from the dead and, freed from the morality that burdens only the living, lives fully, wildly—even happily, ever after.

The title seized him: My Life as A Dead Man