Free Fool's Ride (The Jenkins Cycle Book 2) by John L. Monk

and I didn’t this time. All I knew is I was sitting on a bedpan one moment and the next I wasn’t.
----
    D an stands in the entrance to an apartment building. He hears a chuckle from behind him, then feels intense pain as a knife slams in under his ribs. He bends over, trying to breathe, but can’t. No—he’s breathing, it’s just not helping. Pant pant pant, all for nothing. His chest seizes up on him, and then—
    He’s falling. The wind whips past his face in a roar of sound. The world is a spinning tube of black and white and black and white. His tumbling levels out enough that he catches sight of an enormous span, far above him. A suspension bridge. He hits the water, and then—
    He looks up from his cell phone in time to see the back of a pickup truck rushing toward him, and then—
    Bullets slam into him. He drops his gun, but the police keep firing. “Wait,” he gasps, but the police choose not to, and then—
    He’s bouncing down a flight of stairs. His hands aren’t where he needs them to be and he watches helplessly as hard tiles hurtle up to meet him in a looming, life-ending faceplant, and then—
    He dies in another car crash.
    He slips on slick tiles and strikes his head.
    Another crash.
    Dan screams forever over the course of countless deaths, his voice changing with each successive ride: high, low, raspy, shrill, smooth. Sort of like in that “wazaaap” commercial everyone was imitating way back when.
    He dies in an empty hospital room, choking on his own congestion.
    His last breath exhales in a cloudy plume in a forest, cold and dark, his body numb and drowsy.
    Something like glass stabs him in the chest again and again, and the last thing he sees is the comforting face of a child with enormous blue eyes. She’s smiling at him like she knows him. She leans down as if to whisper something in his ear … but he’s gone before he can hear it.
    Dan flails about, grabbing or dropping or leaping or twisting each time, hoping for anything to pull him out of the death cycle, but all he does is die, die, die.
    Another heart attack and he dies.
    Another car crash and he dies.
    He dies.
    He dies.
    A slaughter of deaths later, Dan’s hands close around something warm and meaty and he squeezes desperately for dear life. He knows he’s fighting—not dying—and so he fights back with everything in him, and wonder of all: he lives.
----
    I fought .
    We were on the ground. Myself, a black guy with powerful arms, sweating and breathing heavily, and someone else, a white guy, also big. I had him around the neck from behind, with my legs wrapped around his waist. Though I held on tightly, I wondered if maybe I should let go and run off. Somehow I’d popped into another body, but I couldn’t dwell on that astonishing fact.
    “Let … go … man … can’t … breathe…”
    Though his voice was strained and raspy, I recognized him—it was Jacob!
    Somehow, I’d come back as Brian, and we were sparring together like Jacob had suggested earlier. He’d offered to teach Brian a few moves. I remembered it perfectly, like all my rides after I’d been kicked out, with the perfect memory of the dead.
    Rather than let him go, I held on tighter—and squeezed . With everything in me, I choked the sonofabitch. Because I also remembered what Lana had said about the woman on the gurney: The boys worked so hard to find her.
    When Lana had entered the TV room, wearing her weird outfit with all the spikes, Jacob and Brian had cleared out quickly. Brian had pulled an unpleasant face at the mention of Lana and me getting our freak on . He’d known something of Lana’s plans.
    Jacob thrashed spastically while I continued to squeeze, both with my arms—like I’d seen in those videos years ago—and with my legs, to keep him from getting away. Maybe Brian was in the process of learning something, or teaching something, because he was in the exact place needed for me to take over. A good thing, because after seeing