The Ferryman Institute (51 page)

He wished he could say she looked perfectly serene, hooked up to the ventilator with its rhythmic
hiss
, but there was a touch of pain around her closed eyes that spoke to the contrary. An examination determined that the bullet had entered from her left side,
passed through both her lungs, and exited. How it missed all of her ribs was anyone's guess. That was often the way of it, wasn't it—an eighth of an inch in one direction instead of the other the only difference between still breathing and six feet down. The ventilator was essentially keeping her from asphyxiating, but it was only a matter of time before the internal bleeding proved too much for her body to bear. There was nothing anyone could do.

When the ETD was a few minutes away, the few people who were in the room—the members of the Council and a handful of Melissa's staff—began to pay their final respects. Although those with Ferryman Keys and Council members (who apparently didn't need them, which explained an awful lot) would have been able to see her spirit after she passed on, it was agreed that Charlie would handle it like any other case: alone. Melissa had been an exemplary employee for the Institute, but that didn't guarantee she'd be understanding in death.
Everything for the good of the many
, Charlie remembered thinking bitterly.

The room emptied out, except for Cartwright, who stayed a moment longer.

“It is rather remarkable,” he said quietly. “I believe as ageless, undying men and women, we have come to view death through a lens far removed from reality. I will begrudgingly admit to feeling detached, myself. Which is to say, I couldn't understand your feelings when we last spoke out in the desert. It is strange, then, when it impacts one of our own . . . a stark reminder of the deep and profound sense of loss that accompanies death. Maybe that is what makes you such an extraordinary yet ill-equipped Ferryman.”

With a stolen glance, Charlie looked over at his mentor. “How so?”

Cartwright put his hand on Charlie's shoulder and patted it gently. “Because maybe for you, every death is like losing one of
your own.” He returned Charlie's look with earnest, somber eyes. “How could anyone possibly acclimate to that?” Without saying another word, Cartwright squeezed his shoulder, turned, and left the room.

Charlie stood, Cartwright's words heavy in his ears. At this point in his life, he didn't know what to think.

He watched as Melissa's blood pressure continued to drop, bit by bit. Finally, her pulse disappeared. There was no horrific alarm signaling nurses to come in, no doctors with defibrillators. It was a suffocating silence, with only the occasional pump from the ventilator punctuating the room.

Moments later, she was standing before him. They looked at each other, neither particularly moving. Eventually, Melissa looked at her corporeal self with a sad smile. Charlie fingered his Ferryman Key, finding a modicum of solace in its gilded letters and familiar weight. Even now that he was mortal, the key still did its job.

“I'm glad you took me up on this last assignment. It's kind of a tradition, one president passing to the next, even if this transition isn't exactly proceeding normally.” Though she was speaking to him, she was still looking down at herself. “I was a little worried you wouldn't.”

“Because I wouldn't be able to handle it emotionally?” he asked.

Her eyes lingered for a second more on the woman in the bed before she turned her attention to Charlie. “Yeah, something like that.”

Charlie rubbed the back of his head. “Well, I appreciate the honesty.”

After they lapsed into silence, Charlie spoke up again. “You knew the whole time what was coming, didn't you?”

She took a few steps away from her bed toward Charlie. “Did I win the Oscar for best female Ferryman in a lead role?” The casual enthusiasm Melissa displayed erased any doubt Charlie had about her mental well-being postlife.

“Sorry,” Charlie said, “it went to Meryl Streep again.”

Her laughter filled the room. “Jeez, they wouldn't even give it to me posthumously,” she said. Charlie must have been wearing his heart on his sleeve, as she immediately remarked: “Come on, Charlie, don't look like that. It's only death.”

He snorted and looked away.

“Listen,” she said with the familiar managerial tone she used when things needed to get done. “I'm not going to stay here long. The more I draw this out, the harder it's going to be for the both of us. You know it, I know it. So, a few important things. On the back bookshelf, there's a section for some of my own personal books. Wedged in between
The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy
and
A Dirty Job
is a binder. It's for you. Unfortunately, I don't really get to talk you through some of the things I've learned in my relatively short tenure as president, so I made a primer that will hopefully be an adequate guide to your new role. I'll be honest, it's kind of thrown together, given the short heads-up I had, but I hope it helps all the same. I included a letter addressed to Virgil, and I'd appreciate it if you gave it to him. There's also letters to members of my staff. I put some instructions in there for them, just to get them along, but they're all great, as I'm sure you'll find out. You're also going to need a new vice president, as I imagine Shira—she was mine—will probably want to try her hand at managing. The rest of my staff, you're more than welcome to keep on board. That's up to you.”

When Charlie continued to avoid looking at her, she stuck her head into his field of view. “Hey,” she said, looking mildly concerned, “you getting all of this?”

“Mmm,” Charlie said by way of reply.

Melissa sighed. “You've done this a million times before, Charlie. I'm just the final drop of water in a very full bucket. One more job.”

“You don't get it,” he blurted out, his voice louder than he meant. “I treated you like crap—always running off, disappearing without telling anyone. You know, just generally making your life miserable.”

Melissa eyed him carefully. “Let me ask you a question: Now that you know the truth about me and Virgil, do you honestly think I didn't know where you were? Maybe on a few rare occasions I only had a vague notion, but realistically speaking? I always knew.”

“That's not the point. I was always selfish, and you've been nothing but selfless all the way to the end of your life. And now, here I am, standing around like an idiot because there's nothing I can do to repay you. To borrow a phrase, it fucking sucks big, fat donkey balls.”

With a measured grace, Melissa took a few steps closer. “So you feel bad because you think you're indebted to me?”

“No.” He thrust his Ferryman Key out in front of himself, and turned it hard. A familiar
click
echoed, but there was a sharp grinding undertone that followed it. “I feel bad because you were a friend—a really great one—and not only am I just realizing that, but now I'll never get the chance to show you how much I appreciate it.” The invisible door slowly creaked open, revealing the blinding white light of the world beyond.

Melissa's focus was initially on Charlie, but as the door continued to gently slide open, her eyes wandered over. As the outpouring of light formed a veil across her face, Melissa's eyes grew wider.

“Oh God,” she whispered. “It's beautiful.” She stared at it, unblinking, for several seconds before she wrested her eyes back. Despite her best efforts, she couldn't help but cast expectant glances in that direction every couple of seconds. Finally, she shook her head, as if forcing a thought from her mind, and steeled her gaze on Charlie.

“Charlie, I didn't do this to make you feel bad, but you are who you are. There's not a whole lot I can say that will change that. But you finally have the chance to be happy now, and after all you've been through, without once complaining to me about how much this was eating you up inside . . . you need to take this chance. This isn't punishment for me. I've been given more years than any person rightly deserves. I've seen it all, and now I get to go home. I'm not scared anymore. And to be perfectly clear, don't you dare think for one second that I didn't like being your manager. If I leave here with one regret, it's that I never got to be a true manager to you and Dirkley. I think that really would have been a blast.”

She walked past Charlie and stood in the doorway, her spirit almost completely enveloped by the light. “Can I tell you one thing, as a friend, before I leave?”

Charlie shuffled his feet and tried to look at her—the sheer intensity of the light forced him to shade his eyes with his hand. “Sure,” he said dumbly. Melissa seemed to be fading away, as if she was becoming one with the light.

“I'm glad you saved the girl.” Her voice sounded distant now, like a person calling out from a moving train. “You want to pay me back for this? Then take good care of her. And Dirkley. And yourself.”

He was barely able to make out the last words. He thought he could hear her say something else, but he couldn't quite catch it,
and so the words were lost in the space between the world of men and the world beyond. No sooner had she finished speaking, her silhouette now lost in the blinding radiance, than the door swung shut, filling the room with a loud
SLAM
.

Then, something happened that Charlie had never seen before: his key fell to the floor with a clatter. He gingerly picked it up, noticing immediately that something was different. The word
PORTHMEUS
, one of the defining features of the key, was no longer engraved in the shaft. He knew instinctively that it was just another ordinary key now . . . and he was just an ordinary man.

WHEN CHARLIE
snapped out of his reverie several minutes later, he found himself standing in front of the bookshelf Melissa had mentioned, the plain black binder she'd made clutched in his hand, half removed from the shelf. He'd had so many other things on his mind—what to do about the still missing Javrouche, how to break Melissa's passing to Dirkley, what to do about
everything
involving the Council and their bazillion secrets—that he'd almost completely forgotten about the primer. Charlie pulled it from the shelf, then returned to his desk, dropping it on top with a meager
thud
. It was thinner than he'd expected, but as Melissa had said, time wasn't exactly on her side when she'd put it together. He eased the cover open.

The first section was a collection of inset folders, each containing several sealed envelopes with names hastily scrawled across them. They were for Melissa's staff, no doubt. Charlie grimaced at the thought of passing those out—
Hey there, I'm your new boss because your old one kicked the bucket just for me. Pleased to meet you.
He decided he'd host a meeting with all of them tomorrow before doing individual meetings—it would probably be easier that way.

The next section, a collection of documents, made up the majority of the binder's contents. Most were typed, but several were clearly copies of much older, handwritten forms. As Charlie continued flipping through, he would occasionally find a sticky note from Melissa affixed to a page. The headers of the documents weren't all that illuminating—titles like “A Treatise on the Nature of the Ferryman Artifacts” and “Notes on the Selection of Ferrymen” didn't exactly reveal much—but Charlie hoped they would after a careful reading.

He reached the final section, and flipped it open. Inside was a plain manila folder inserted freely into the binder, a large note attached to its front. It read:

Thought you might be interested in this.

—Mel

The memo earned a raised eyebrow.
Well, I am now
, Charlie thought. It wasn't like Melissa to be circumspect. He removed the note and slid out the folder. The first thing he noticed was the stamp hidden underneath, clearly blazoned across the folder's cover:
Office of the President.
The second were the words written on the folder's tab.

Death Record: Elizabeth Crowley Dawson

Charlie stared at the name, his brain slowly piecing together what he was looking at. Then his hands started to tremble, so much so that he had to set the folder down on the desk. The pain in his head, his leg—everywhere really—disappeared instantly. He shrank away from the folder like it was a leper.

His wife . . . It was everything the Institute knew about his wife—including how she died.

When it became clear after his induction into the Ferryman
Institute that Charlie wouldn't be allowed to see Elizabeth again, he'd spent a considerable amount of time trying to find out this very information. What had become of her? For years—decades even—he'd asked around as discreetly as possible. He knew the odds were minuscule—given the sheer number of Ferrymen who existed and their continual turnover, it wasn't so much finding a needle in a haystack as in a forest. Still, Charlie went about his quest undaunted. But as the years passed, either no one he talked to had her case, or no one could remember. After eighty years, his questioning became far less frequent. By ninety, he only asked as an offhand aside every now and then. A hundred years? Maybe he asked once or twice.

And now, lying in front of him, were his answers.

Which, of course, was the exact moment the knock on his door came.

Charlie cleared his throat and replaced the folder in the binder. “Come in,” he called.

The door cracked open a bit, then Alice's head poked out from behind it. She looked at him, then took a quick survey of the room from behind the door. Apparently satisfied that it wasn't booby-trapped, she slid in, closing the door behind her. She stood in front of it, both her hands behind her back on the knob still.

“Hey,” she said.

Charlie didn't move. He was simply too surprised to see her. “Hey” was all he managed back.