“...Bloggs, mid twenties, found dead at the side of the road outside Queen Street Station. Hey Mike? Should I write down that no one saw what happened to him or just leave that part blank?”

  “Yeah, just say no apparent cause of death and they’ll put the guy in for a post-mortem.”

  “Sure…cold to the touch... no pulse or heartbeat… no wallet, phone or I.D. If it was a mugging then it was the weirdest one I’ve seen.”

  “In your vast one week of experience?”

  “It’s been nine days if you remember how counting works.”

  The conversation was becoming clearer, as my brain began working again. Still though, I kept my eyes closed. I was lying down and could feel the vibrations of a moving vehicle. I gave a tentative sniff of the air around me. It smelled clean. I don’t mean lemony fresh or anything like that, but as though the room had been scrubbed by someone with a personal vendetta against the zero-point-one percent of germs that survived. I guessed from what was being said it must be the back of an ambulance. Okay, so I had most likely two paramedics with me in a moving ambulance. I was in an ambulance.

  An ambulance.

  A moving ambulance… on Earth. It clicked. The rest of my brain woke up. I was back on Earth. I was alive again. Well, close enough. A tingling sensation spread over my skin at my excitement, feeling almost like I was back in the barracks, lying down to sleep while exposed to the power of Pandora in the air. I did my best not to change my facial expression, these guys thought I was dead. I didn’t feel dead.

  “Can we even fill the form out saying this guy is legally dead if we don’t have a name? Or shall we wait until he comes back as a zombie and we can ask him?”

  Well... I knew my entrance.

  “My name is Daniel,” I said, opening my eyes and twisting around to face her. “Thanks for picking me up.”

  The reaction was beautiful. I mean, I only saw part of it, since the ambulance was well lit and my eyes weren’t used to it. Luckily they adjusted fast enough to catch the tail end of the slack jawed expression on the young female paramedic sitting across from me, filling out a form on the clipboard on her lap. A clipboard that now lay forgotten, as was the pen rolling towards the rear doors. She looked like someone new to the job, young, with blonde hair tied back in a messy ponytail, big blue eyes that brimmed with obvious intelligence behind them. Not a bad sight to see, waking up from death. Those eyes changed after a heartbeat. She closed her mouth and narrowed them at me suspiciously, then stared. Really starred, like I’d played a joke on her and she hadn’t enjoyed being the butt of it.

  “What was that?” shouted a voice from the driver's seat. Mike, the guy who’d answered the woman’s questions. “Did he just wake up?”

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  “Uh huh,” the medic said slowly, without taking her eyes off me, or blinking.

  “You look like you’ve seen a ghost.” I teased. I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t enjoying myself.

  “You were... you didn’t have a pulse.” A little stir went through her body and I could almost feel the switch flip and her tone turned from shocked to professional. She blinked at last and looked at me normally, reclassifying me from idiot prankster to patient who may still be in trouble. “Sir, you were found lying on the pavement near the city centre with no pulse, nor were you breathing. We need to get you checked out at the hospital right away.”

  “Got it,” Mike said from the front, and a second later the siren began to blare.

  “No, that's fine,” I said, sitting up fast and turning to the paramedic. I did not think getting checked out at the hospital was a good idea. I didn’t know how this new body was going to work, I may still not have a pulse. The name on the paramedic’s ID said Abigail. “Don’t waste your time on me Abby, I feel great.”

  She looked at me and set her jaw like someone who was planning to walk into a wall and expected it to move out of her way or else. “Sir, if you want to leave we can’t stop you, but you really should...”

  “Great!” I exclaimed as I clapped my hands together. “Are we in Cardiff?”

  She wrinkled an eyebrow, before slowly saying: “Yeeessss…”

  “Fantastic,” I said, craning my neck to get a look out the windshield. “Let me out anywhere around here.”

  Abigail started talking again and I let it wash over me. The bits that registered were just about the risks of not getting a proper checkover and potential health problems, brain damage, death, etc. I was alive again! I’d been expecting a lot more of a briefing about that part of the job before it actually happened, but here I was! I stretched out my muscles as much as I could in the tight confines of the ambulance. I knew it wasn’t really my body, at least not the same one I had before, but I was just pleased at the lack of rigor mortis.

  This wasn’t my body. From what Raphael had said we had faux bodies made for us, that would allow us to walk the earth once more. The restless dead shall rise and consume all life. It was our time! I wonder if I could scare Lance with some zombie movies, then convince him that anyone returning to life was expected to conduct themselves in a zombieish manner.

  Jokes aside, I didn't feel any different now than I did in my real body. I checked and my heart was beating, I had a pulse. I … I felt alive. I knew on a fundamental level that I wasn't, but I still let a smile stretch over my face. It was a goofy grin.

  Abigail had stopped talking and was looking at me expectantly. What had she been…oh right.

  “I understand all of the risks you mentioned and still want to be released.”

  She glowered. “Name two risks I mentioned.”

  “Errr...I understand all of the risks you mentioned and still want to be released”

  “You didn’t know what city you were in!”

  I thought about what else I could say. “...I understand all of-”

  “Fine!” She glared at me hard enough that had I not just met eyes with an archangel, I would have been intimidated. I shrugged and gave a smile so innocent any self respecting judge would’ve found me guilty on the spot. The glare continued, until she sighed and called for the driver to pull over so I could get out. She then retrieved her pen from the ground and reorganised the forms on her clipboard. “Can I at least get your name for the forms?”

  “Daniel Mason.”

  She wrote it down. “And your address?”

  I gave it. She was halfway through asking for a contact telephone number when I realised what I was doing. Bad idea. I was dead. I was a dead man walking. I had died. Death was me. And I had just given out my name and address to a person who could access medical records. Oh yeah, watch out forces of darkness. Daniel Mason has been on mission for a minute and he’s only screwed up once* so far.

  *We all wish it had been only once.

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