CHAPTER 3: Maybe.

While we were discussing about our plan of possessing other people's bodies, two tall men came in through the door. They were nurses and along with them, they were dragging a stretcher.

Valek and I walked towards the foot side of the bed to make space for them. They pulled the stretcher on the right side of my bed where my dead body laid peacefully. Both of them started wrapping the white sheet over my body, covering my feet and arms as well. After covering me (my body) completely both of them picked it up with all their energy and put it over the stretcher. I must have been heavy as they seemed to take heavy breaths after putting me down.

I stood there with absolutely no knowledge of how to react to all that.

"Wait! Where are you taking me?" I asked them while forgetting the fact that humans couldn't listen to me anymore.

"You mean your body, right?" Valek said while interrupting me.

"Yeah, thanks for pin pointing my grammatical mistake and correcting it." I replied harshly as I was not in a state of handling any jokes, especially from him.

"Technically, it's a wrong word usage mistake. Your sentence doesn't make any sense according to English." He gave a quirky smile while saying that.

He was enjoying the whole situation and the little jokes he made. His effort of acting sensible was completely driving me nuts, but all he did was to irritate me even more.

"No stop, wait, you can't take me away. I tried stopping one of the nurses by holding his arm, but once again, my hands went right through him.

They continued moving outside the room, in an almost running way as if they had a limitless line of bodies waiting to be taken away by them.

"Can you just help me or not?" I said while looking hopefully at Valek, thinking he could help me in some way.

"There is nothing to help about Linda. They are taking your body to the cold room." This time he said it with not so much of a smiling face.

"Cold room?" I asked.

"The morgue room." He replied.

My body froze there completely. It was like my legs and arms had lost their power to move.

"They…they can't take me there. They just can't. Tell them I'm right here. How can they take me there? I am right here Valek. Please tell them. Please!" I nearly begged him this time. I was losing my senses.

"Control yourself Linda and accept it. That is no longer your body and you can't have it back." He said in a strong, straightforward way.

"But you said I could take another body why can't I just take mine, I don't need to have any other body please just give me mine back."

"I can't do that, Linda I am sorry. There are rules in our world too. I can give you another body to possess, but not yours." He took a pause there to inhale all the stress in the atmosphere. "I am sorry, but there is nothing that I can do here. I am really, really very sorry."

"But my body will freeze in there." I said it while crying and got on my knees. Getting another life but not mine, dying, possessing other people's bodies, president of hell….what was happening to me. It all seemed to be the worst of nightmares that I could ever get.

"Yes, it will become something of an icicle. Or perhaps it would get warm. But the thing is just to be strong Linda and accept it and stop crying it is making me very uncomfortable."

"How in the world would it get warm in the morgue room Valek? Huh? Tell me." I said in the angriest tone I had.

"I don't know, but yeah, it would be warmer in there without your cold soul to ice it up." He said while cheering me as if I liked his nonsense irritating jokes.

"For once" I rose up and walked towards him. "Just for once Mr. Valek death can you be a little, tiny bit serious about me hella dying today and losing my body to let it get frozen up in the morgue room, doomed to stay with you, standing here making jokes of all this shit." My eyes got about two times bigger while being angry at him and saying this.

"Ok Linda." He stepped back a little. "No need to get all this angry with me. Fine I won't be making any jokes now. But we really need to go now. We can't stay here much longer."

"What do you mean by that?" I was a bit relieved after he said about the no jokes making thing.

"Mean by what exactly?"

"We can't stay here much longer." I tried to mimic his style of speaking in which I failed completely.

"You want to roam around in these walls all day then be my guest, but, I am going." He then started to walk towards the door.

"No, wait. Where are you going?"

"I am the son of death, I can go anywhere I want."

I held his arm with both hands tightly. He was my only hope in surviving such a situation. He looked at me then looked at my hands and gave me a weird look.

"I'll go with you." I said it while letting go of his arm.

"Yeah, and don't forget the zipper," he said while we were walking in the hallway.

"The what?"

"The zipper for keeping your mouth shut while we do some research."

"Yeah, very funny Valek. Very much funny."

"Nope, I am dead serious."

"Yeah, ok thanks for letting me know that."

"No, the pleasure is all mine." He said while thinking he's got the higher hand in this.

"Where are we going exactly?" I asked while walking in the hallway. There were nurses and doctors, all rushing here and there.

"I have no idea myself." I don't know what he meant by that, but yeah, he was completely sure of his answer.

"A doomed soul and son of death himself going to a surprise picnic I guess." I mumbled to myself.

"What did you say?" I didn't know I was loud enough to be heard but he heard it some way.

"Nothing." I replied sternly.

"Come on, speak up now."

"Nothing. I was just thinking how we would find the girl or body or whatever."

"It's only a matter of time."

"Maybe we should look in the hospitals."

"You just stole my idea."

"Yeah, you must have had to think so hard to come up with that one."

"Yes, but it's fine, you can take the credit for it."

"Thanks." I said it in an uncertain way. I didn't know the son of death could be this childish and dramatic.

"We should look in the children's section."

"Why do we need to look in the children's section? I don't want to possess a child's body."

"Oh, we are not going to take the body of a newborn child Linda."

"Then?"

"We will look for any young girl whose soul is at peace."

Valek and I stood in front of the elevator at the end of the hallway. We started staring at the door of the elevator.

"So?" I said.

"So what?"

"Aren't you going to fly us out or float through the wall or something?"

"No, I am just waiting for the elevator."

Yeah, right the son of death, Valek death is waiting for an elevator to get us on the upper floor. It was simply wow because it showed how stupid it was of me to follow someone like him.

"You don't have strange, deadly like powers?" I was a bit shocked after hearing that.

"Of course I have." He kept staring at the door the whole time.

"Then why don't you use it?" I was getting curious.

"Why would I need to use it in the world of science, stupid? And it's super tiring as well. It consumes a lot of my energy and I want to save it all for your soul transferring."

"Oh ok." It made a little sense… No, it didn't. It made no sense at all. How come the son of death gets tired. Wasn't he like a non-tiring spirit or something? How could he possess such human traits? Well, I couldn't ask him that.

We stood there for 5 minutes straight calmly expecting for the elevator to arrive any minute now. It was like waiting forever. And then it finally came. The doors opened in front of us and out of it came people. There were lots and lots of people. I don't know how they fitted in there in the first place. I feared they would drag me with them, but the interesting thing was they slipped right through us.

They didn't even know we were there. It couldn't have been more exciting. I felt a little tickling sensation at first, but then it was normal.

Valek and I stepped into the elevator along with a woman who had just arrived. She pressed the number 4 floor button.

"So we are going to the same floor I guess?" I asked him.

"Yeah, as we have no place to start so let's just start from anywhere."

It was like a century had passed while we were in the elevator. Maybe it had some technical issues because it was moving at the speed of a tortoise.

"Ok, so what is 2 plus 2?" I asked Valek. It was some kind of a lame joke I had heard when I was young and I wanted to try it on him.

"What do you mean?" he didn't seem sure of what I was asking him.

I repeated my question. "What is 2 plus 2?"

"Four." He said still not being sure of why I asked him such a dumb question.

"No. You are wrong. 2 plus 2 makes a fish. You just need to merge them together and draw a face." I laughed like a crazy person then on my lame joke while Valek stood there giving my creepy looks.

Approximately two minutes later, the elevator stopped and the door opened.

"Exactly where will we find a girl's body now?" I asked him while walking out of the elevator into a big room full of patients, nurses and some doctors.

"It is a hospital, Linda. There are tons of people dying all day here." He replied as if it was a normal thing of people dying for him. Well, it was a normal thing for him as he was the actual President of Hell. That is when a thought struck me.

I stopped Valek and jumped to stand in front of him blocking his way.

"If you were sent to bring my soul, then this means I was going to hell?"

"No stupid…Uh. Ok, fine. I am right now not authorized to be the president of hell. I am much of a demon who escorts the spirits to the spirit world."

"What do you mean by that?"

"This means right now my brother is in charge of the hell and not me. My age doesn't qualify for that right now."

"How old are you?"

"I don't know somewhere between 0.97million and I need to reach a million to get authorized for that."

"You know when you say it like that, it sounds creepy."

"Can we just ignore my age for now?"

"Sure." I was so damn shocked after hearing that I didn't even have anything else to say.

"You know, to be honest, I really don't want to see a young girl die. I don't want to see someone's parents losing their child. It would rip their hearts out."

Valek was standing there with a serious look on his face while listening to what I was saying.

I continued, "Of course I don't know how much it would hurt them because I never had any."

"You never had what?" he asked.

"Parents." I said.

After saying this I stood there firmly. My mouth didn't have the energy to spill out any other word. All the flashbacks of my rotten childhood floated in front of me.