Free Stay Dead 2: The Dead and The Dying by Steve Wands

no hand in raising the child. More storm clouds. The
thunder and lightning return.
    She’s driving. It’s raining. The sky
is bleeding purple and red. The car is swerving. She can’t see.
It’s spinning. She’s screaming. There’s an impact. She smacks her
head and her vision goes black as lighting strikes across her
eyes.
    She awakes and knows something is
wrong. She’s back at the beach, staring at her father who is now
standing knee deep in the ocean holding a baby—her baby. She feels
her stomach, but it feels hollow with only the faintest trace of a
ghost.
    She walks toward the water but with
each step the ocean recedes. She tries to run to it, to feel the
water swallow her feet, but despite her best attempts the ocean is
no closer. A message in a bottle is at her feet and it’s a suicide
note from her mother that goes on seemingly forever. She drank
herself to death, and the bottle in Dawn’s hands was the very
bottle she was found clutching, empty of everything but regrets.
The regrets were hastily jotted down on the note.
    Lightning.
    She hits her head against the window
and wakes up. For a minute she’s not sure where she is but hopes
she’s still pregnant and is able to stop the car from spinning out
of control but then she looks over and sees Jon-Jon and knows that
the damage is done and the dream is over.
    “ Hey sleepy-head. Feel
refreshed?”
    “ Uh…not at all. My neck is
killing me. How long was I out?”
    “ I dunno, maybe like an
hour, hour and a half.”
    “ Damn. Are we there
yet?”
    “ Not you too. It’s bad
enough I have to hear it from these dicks in the back and now
you?”
    “ Relax.”
    In the back of the van Chung-Hee sat
squished next to Chuck. They were both fairly small men, but with
so many people in so little space everywhere was tight. He leaned
away from him as best he could but with every bounce on the road he
just ended up bouncing right back into him.
    When the van grew silent—as it often
did—Chung-Hee’s mind drifted to thoughts of Naraka. This was far
from what he imagined the underworld to be, but what this was
certainly wasn’t the world he remembered. Naraka is a place where
the souls of the sinful are sent for expiation of sins. For
redemption—reconciliation, even forgiveness. Chung-Hee could think
of nothing in his life that would secure him such a fate. He was
never able to live up to his parent’s expectations, true, but
neither was he the bane of their existence. From what he could tell
he was a hard-working man, more so than his peers. Everything he
owned he worked for. He was given nothing in this life other than
the necessities he needed, the love he warranted, and the
expectations to live up to—or at least strive for.
    Naraka is supposed to be a place of
justice. Not a place like this—a place of torment, of suffering
unwarranted. Chung-Hee considered the possibility that he was dead.
He was dead and unaware of his demise or sins and as he came closer
to righting his wrongs a sense of clarity would overcome him. And
if that were the case then he could think of nothing he did that
would lead him toward any sort of reconciliation. He was simply
trying to survive—as were the rest of the people in his
group.
    How he could atone for a sin he didn’t
know he committed was beyond him. All he could do was what he
thought was right, which is what he’s been doing all along. In his
mind, Naraka was a terrible place full of terrible people having
unthinkable things being done to them for the sake of penance. He
envisioned people being boiled, skinned, beaten, raped, and even
eaten. Naraka was a land that was ruled by darkness to bring about
light, full of evil, vile, punishments for those that deserved such
a fate. It was no place for children—what could they have done? And
yet, they were here too.
    Chung-Hee shook it from his mind,
though he knew he would eventually drift there again. Naraka was a
place for the dead and for the wicked—not a place