Chapter 3: Back From the Dead

Kai opened his eyes. But he still couldn’t see anything. Everything was dark.

He tried getting up but his head hit the ceiling. He was in a very cramped room. It only fit two or three of his own body stacked. He was lying down and he couldn’t get up.

“Now what is this? Is this hell for sure?”

He stopped to try and remember everything that happened. First the monster in the school, the other one in that weird dream.

Kai noticed he was panting. The air was rarefied.

‘I need fresh air.’ He thought.

Kai started knocking on the ceiling. It seemed to be made of hardwood.

“Damn it. It’s locked.”

Kai got a bit desperate and tried harder.

‘Wait, if my body is craving so much for air does this mean I’m still alive?’ He thought.

Kai tried using the awesome power his body had in the dream. He pictured his punch breaking through the wooden ceiling.

But this time his body didn’t respond very well. The punch was far weaker than he would expect and the impact made his hand hurt.

“Ouch!”

His vision began getting more accustomed to the environment. He noticed there were hinges on the corner of the ceiling.

“Maybe if I try opening from there…?”

Kai was out in no time.

It was a coffin.

He left the coffin and saw himself in a cemented room. The cement seemed to be still fresh.

“What is all this? Where am I? What’s going on?”

Kai realized he was dressed fancy. He was wearing formal clothes and a brand new pair of shoes. He spent the next five or ten minutes repeatedly kicking the cement until it all fell off.

“Thank goodness I was not barefoot” He muttered as he left the cemented room.

He realized he was in the downtown cemetery. He had been there a couple of times before. He looked back at the place he just came from. A grave on a wall. The cemetery had those instead of having people actually be buried underground. They put the casket inside a hole and cemented it.

“Kai P. Erickson. 2004-2020,” he read. “Sounds morbid.”

He stretched the body and got a full gulp of air.

“Did I really die? But then… Why am I here? What about those powers? Unbelievable! I’m not sure what’s real or not anymore!”

Kai extended his hand and tried releasing the energy again. Nothing happened. He tried again, and again.

‘Nothing, heh?’ He thought. ‘I guess that’s to be expected. It was just a dream after a…’

In the next attempt, he felt a gust of wind coming out of his body. The energy hit the wall in front of him. He heard a thump. But it didn‘t do any visual damage to the cement.

‘What is this? I still have some trace of power!?’ Kai stared at his hands in disbelief. ‘Anyway… I should go back home. It looks late…’

Kai had to walk as he seemed to not be carrying his wallet. It took him a long couple of hours to reach back. He was all worn out when he knocked on the front door.

His mother took a while but answered, with disheveled hair and horrible appearance, like he had a very bad day.

“Kai!? Kai!!”

She rushed from the window to the front door.

His mother could barely contain herself.

“Oh. You’re here! You are alive! You are really my son!”

‘Well, this is awkward…’ Kai thought as he withstood the big wave of hugs. Soon dad also came and he noticed he wouldn’t rest very early in that night.

“Kai!? How are you alive? What happened?”

“I…” He tried to come up with an answer but he was the one who understood the least.

“Please never jump like that again…” Her mother said to him.

“…Jumped?”

“You scared us real good, there. Jumping from the balcony at school. We couldn’t understand… But now you’re here, so…” His dad realized they were still at the front door. “Anyway, let’s come in.”

“Yeah…”

‘It seems I’m gonna have a lot of explaining to do…’ Kai observed.

It took him long, but Kai’s parents finally let him go to his room and lay in his comfy bed. However, he could still not sleep at all. The words of his mother still reverbed in his head.

‘Please never jump like that again… What the hell happened that day at school? I didn’t jump sh*t. It was some animal thing that did that. And I was nowhere close to the stairs even… What did that girl tell the people at school? She saw it too, right?’

Kai rolled for the thousandth time in his blanket.

‘Ah, screw this… Next time I go to school I’m going to find out what happened.’

As any regular student who died and came back from the dead, Kai took a couple of days before he started frequenting school again. He only got back to the studies in the next week. He arrived late to the first class and had to go straight to his spot.

In the way, he glanced at the front row and saw her again. Aimee.

Among all the students who were clearly staring at the ‘guy who jumped and came back’ during that silent moment of his arrival that interrupted the English class, Aimee herself seemed to be the most shocked of them.

‘You…’ He thought. ‘You are still alive, too. I need to know what happened on that day. I am going to make you spill it all to me in the interval.’

Kai was forced to just sit in his spot and act like nothing was wrong through the next hours. The eyes of his classmates followed his every action uncomfortably.

Minutes after the teacher resumed class, he asked for the short colleague who would always sit next to him.

“Hey…” he whispered. “Can you lend me… The… Textb…” He noticed the colleague he always forgot the name was facing up front, pretending he didn’t hear him.

‘Great, now I’m the weird guy.’ Kai thought. ‘Thanks a lot, Aimee.’

In the middle of the second class, he began hearing rattling coming from the ceiling. Something seemed to be running around. A person? No… It was an animal. Those were definitely the sound of paws.

It was like a very energetic pet was knocking the thing over and the noises were really loud.

‘C’mon I cannot concentrate like this… I can barely hear the teacher.’ Kai thought about asking the teacher to at least talk louder but as he was about to raise his hand, he noticed everybody was acting like they weren’t hearing anything.

‘What’s going on…?’

Aimee, in the second row, raised her hand and said she was going to the bathroom.

‘This girl… She knows something. I bet she is also hearing all of that.’ Kai thought.

Kai also raised his hand.

“Sir, can I go to the bathroom?”

“The rule is one student in the bathroom at a time, Kai.”

“Yeah. But I’m not going to the lady’s one, sir.”

Kai managed to get permission and went straight to the upper floor, where the noise seemed to be coming from. He was expecting to corner Aimee and ask her what the hell was all of that about.

‘On a normal day, I would have gotten at least a giggle from the class with that one… People are still weirded out…’ He thought. ‘Oh, well. I’m going to find Aimee now and make her clarify the things.’

The room on the upper floor was like a deposit. They kept all the things which were used by the staff personnel. Cleaning tools. Boxes of things to be used in remarkable dates. Boxes of who knows what. When he was younger that was a great spot to play with the fellow kids in the interval.

Kai opened the deposit door.

“Aimee…?”

As expected, the boxes had all been thrown around.

Kai felt like someone was in the back of the room, behind the shelf, so he walked amidst all the things, trying to reach it.

“Aimee?” He asked more firmly.

But as he reached the back of the shelf, he didn’t find the girl. Instead, he found another familiar figure: the same monster with the spiky fur of the other day.