The Once-Dead Girl Read online

  The Once-Dead Girl

  by

  Laer Carroll

  Copyright © 2013 by L. E. Carroll

  Summary : Sixteen-year-old cheerleader Bethany Rossiter dies and returns to life a near-superhuman with awesome powers.

  How can she find a way to lead a normal life and still stay true to the responsibilities forced on her by those powers?

  Disclaimer : Contemporary locales and organizations are used fictitiously to portray an alternate universe ten years in advance of our own and with an often very-different history. These portrayals should not be taken as an accurate guide to similar locales and organizations in our universe.

  Credits : The cover background is taken from Wikimedia.org under the GNU Free Documentation License. Astronomical images are from public domain photographs released by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration. The cheerleader image is from a public domain photograph released by the US Air Force. Several backgrounds are photographs taken by the author L. E. Carroll and placed in the public domain on Google’s Picasa web site. The remainder are taken from Wikimedia.org and release under the Creative Commons Share-Alike and Generic Attribution licenses.

  Artwork is the creation of the author and is hereby released into the public domain as so many generous artists have done before.

  Chapter 1 - Resurrection

  Bethany Rossiter had been a fairly ordinary girl before she died and came back to life. A loving mid-scale family, only moderately broken (no tug-of-kids drama, mostly friendly parents). Pretty, but not super-pretty. Good student, she was a better cheerleader. Until she died, that is.

  ·

  “God, I think ALL your entourage is here.”

  Lihua, pronounced Lee-hwa, meant beautiful and elegant. It precisely described Bethany’s closest friend and cheerleader squad mate. Like Beth clad in the short blue pleated miniskirt of all the cheerleaders, she was peering around a corner of the exit from the gymnasium at the stadium seating.

  “Get back here, you idiot,” hissed Beth at Lee. “And stop calling my family an entourage.”

  Lee tossed her long shimmering black hair over one shoulder and turned to skip back to her place in the formation waiting for the signal to run onto the football field. It was the next-to-last game of the California high-school football season and the air was perfect for a night game. A north wind had come down to Burbank from the western San Fernando hills and swept away most of the late-summer heat.

  Mrs. Adams flipped shut her cell-phone, peered at Lee with a jaundiced eye, but said nothing to her.

  “Five minutes,” she said to the squad, loosely organized to make it easier to run onto the field and take up their positions at the mid-field line.

  “Everyone ready? No one needs to pee? Shoe laces tight? You know the drill.”

  “Yes, Mrs. Adams,” came 20 voices in ragged chorus.

  Blond sturdy Jillian Adams peered at her squad. A former Olympic acrobat and a history teacher she had volunteered to take over the cheerleaders three years ago. She was tough but fair and had slowly increased the fitness of her squad without sacrificing the choreography for which it had been known under the former squad leader.

  “Bethany? How are you feeling? Ready for the pyramid routine?”

  “Yes, Ms. Adams,” Beth said, bouncing gently a couple of times on her pure white tennis shoes. At 5’ 1” she was the smallest of the squad. She was also one of the most agile and so had been chosen this year to top the pyramid routine which would be done at half-time.

  “Good. Let’s keep it that way.” The woman turned her head to better hear the loudspeakers mounted around the stadium.

  “There’s our cue. Ready? Let’s go!”

  The woman jogged toward the exit from the gym, then peeled off to stand just outside and keenly watch the 20 girls as they ran out onto the field.

  ·

  Bethany’s accident came just after half time. The routine, ending with her atop the cheer pyramid, came off perfectly—a great relief to Beth. She ended the dismount, everyone went into a final pose, and froze. The audience went wild, some in appreciation, some relieved that the second half could begin.

  Beth looked up in the stands. There were her four parents, bio and step as her big brother Kendall was fond of saying. Ken was there, as was her sister Helen visiting from her first year of med school. And her maternal grandparents and several other family members. Back of them was Miguel, the brother of her father’s girl friend, looking for all the world like a body guard to the hoard of relatives in front of him. He was holding up a hand in an OK sign.

  The euphoria lasted well over ten minutes into the second half. Which perhaps was why Bethany was not fast enough scrambling out of the way of a fast reverse on the field which sent three players hurtling across the sideline. They piled into her and she went down hard, head snapping into the turf.

  There was a flash of light. And Bethany Rossiter, almost 16, died of a broken neck.

  ·

  She dreamed.

  She was a dancing electronic ghost on an airless planet so close to its sun the blazing body took up a quarter of the sky.

  She was a giant balloon-like stingray floating and flying near the top of a giant planet’s air, living like whales off floating plants like plankton.

  She was a cat-like blue centaur on a garden planet with her husband and two kittenish children, one a girl and one a boy. There were two moons rising in a violet and chartreuse sky.

  I’ve been watching Star Voyager too much.

  She was a dolphin-like creature swimming just beneath the surface of an ocean whose choppy surface made a dancing, shifting “sky” over her. Below her long strands of sea plants sent long waving streamers up toward her.

  She was a creature like the Creature from the Blue Lagoon, made seemingly for war with natural armor all over his body. But he was a poet on something like the Australians’ walkabout, bringing news to distant villages in the form of songs and chants and stories.

  I’m a bard.

  She was....

  ·

  “...lucky to be alive.” It was her plastic surgeon bio mother. Just outside the private hospital room Bethany lay in?

  “...if it’s luck to be paralyzed from the neck down,” her police captain bio father said unhappily. He was outside with his girlfriend Miri, Beth’s sort-of step-mother.

  Where was Nicolas, Beth’s sort-of step dad? Two pair of footsteps answered her question. One pair belonged to Miguel. Beth knew that slightly hesitant step of his.

  “Here,” Nicolas said. “Premium coffee. We had to go across the street to get it.”

  “Yes,” said Miguel. “She IS lucky. She had no chance to come back from being dead. There is a chance from being paralyzed. Modern therapy can work miracles.”

  Yes, it could, Beth thought. Mike would know.

  She drifted back to sleep. And her dreams were of being alien creatures.

  The dreams were not nightmares. In fact, they were of everyday life. For aliens. One was drifting in the dark between stars, working out complex mathematics which would let it navigate to a business conference near a far star. She/it finished a formula, gave a command, and went traveling through strange space dimensions far faster than the speed of light.

  I’ve REALLY been watching too much Star Voyager.

  ·

  In the next dreams she was a human—or human in appearance.

  She was on the deck of a primitive sailing vessel carrying two dozen men. All shorter than her. She was dressed in a white robe which ended above her knees. They called her goddess.

  Then she was again non-human, a flying creature a mile above the earth. Her wings were vaguely bat-like.

  Then she was a wandering healer
, driving a wagon behind one large placid horse. A knight in not-so-shining armor rode toward her.

  Then she was again a healer, this time in a hastily thrown-up tent shielding soldiers brought from a battlefield a half-mile away. They brought her old companion to her. He was nearly a hundred years old, but would grow no older.

  “How did he die?” she asked the men who brought him wrapped in a sheet.

  “The foreign prince broke truce. They caught us by surprise. We must retreat.”

  “No. Pass the word. Gather in good order and follow me.”

  Maelgyreyt did not wait. She strode from the tent, shedding her long robe. She washed age from her body as she approached the area where a small cluster of knights gulped food and water and repaired their gear as well as they could. Servants rushed to equip and bring them new horses.

  They stared at the tall naked woman. She ignored them and took up a long-sword. More than a man’s height, it was wielded from a saddle with two hands. To her hand it was as light as a wand.

  “Healer? Is it you?”

  She ignored the three men who rushed up to her and angled to one side around them to take up a second long-sword in her other hand. Then she was at the edge of the camp. She turned.

  “Get yourselves ready. Follow me.”

  Not waiting, she turned and sprang thirty feet or more to the top of a boulder. From there she could see down a long slope to where the invading eastern army was fighting a line of foot soldiers retreating before them. Beyond each end of the line mounted knights protected them from an end-run of eastern foot soldiers.

  Beyond them on horses were the leaders of the foreign army. At their front and center was the eastern prince who had invaded her home country. And broken truce.

  She flung her arms up and out. She screamed out her loss and hate.

  It was not the scream of a human. It came from a chest grown large. It smote the men below as a hammer an anvil.

  The avatar of the God of war began to run in long bounds down the slope. Its skin was the black of night. Strange armor grew to protect every vulnerable spot. Its eyes shown red .

  It bounded high over the stiffening line of its countrymen, landing in bloody grass littered with the garbage of war. Then it was in among the horsemen and Hell had come to earth.

  ·

  Her nose itched. Momentarily she forgot it at the conversation beside her hospital bed. A tall older black woman was lessoning a young male nurse on how to change a saline-drip bag.

  “Nurse?! She opened her eyes!” The young man was short and Latino. Or maybe Italian?

  The black woman whirled to stare at Bethany.

  Curiosity satisfied, Beth turned her attention to the itch. She lifted a hand to scratch it. But couldn’t. There was an IV needle in the arm.

  She tried to lift her other hand. It was tethered somehow.

  Darn it itch! Go away!

  Amazingly it did.

  Beth relaxed back into sleep.

  ·

  But not for long. She was awakened perhaps an hour later by three doctors trailed by the two nurses and an older nurse supervisor with short grey hair.

  They approached her and the doctors began to examine her, the older one using a stethoscope while the other two studied the instruments built into the wall or wheeled into the room.

  She watched them with great interest. It was good not to be drifting in sleep and dreaming. Finally the older doctor focused on her eyes and spoke.

  “Miss Rossiter? Can you hear me?”

  Beth tried to answer but her mouth and throat were dry. Her breath came out as a raspy hiss. So she nodded her head. Though not well. There was some neck brace on her neck. It was so well padded she had not felt it until her neck moved against it .

  “Don’t nod, Miss Rossiter. Your neck was injured. Now, answer my questions with three blinks of your eyes for Yes, two for No. Do you understand me?”

  Beth blinked Yes.

  “Good. Do you think you could swallow some water? It’s a bit tricky lying on your back that way. But if we tilt you and give you small sips you should be able to manage it.”

  Yes.

  The grey-haired nurse—a supervisor?—was there with a plastic cup of water. The senior doctor tilted the bed so that she was half-sitting, not flat on her back. In that position she was able to take a small sip of water.

  Heaven! And interesting too. Somehow Bethany could identify subtle tastes in the presumably purified water.

  After three sips with long pauses in between Beth tried speaking. She had to stop and clear her throat but managed a croaked question.

  “What...happened to me?”

  “You had an accident. You were badly hurt but you are improving.”

  “My family?”

  “As soon as we check you out some more we’ll contact them. They thought you were worse off than you are.”

  The medical people all had thought that too. Though how Beth knew that she did not know how she knew.

  For the next three or so hours she underwent a lot of tests. Some were incomprehensible. Some were not, such as tickling her finger tips and the palms of her hands, and doing the same to her toe tips and the soles of her feet, to see if she felt it.

  Some were uncomfortable though not unbearably so. Such as when they rolled her into the long tube of an “MRI” machine and used magnets to probe her brain and spine. She had to hold very still and put up with a loud bang and buzz at each measurement .

  At lunchtime they rolled her gurney into a private room and put her in bed. They also prepared to hook her up to an IV again. It was lunch time and she was getting hungry.

  You learned to be pushy—or at least not to be pushed around—when you had an older brother and sister who were smart, attractive, and self-absorbed. Bethany’d had enough of being a good little patient.

  “No,” she said when the nurse reached for her wrist. “I want to see a doctor.”

  “There’s none available now, dear. Let me just hook this up to you and you’ll see one after lunch.”

  “No. I want to see a doctor NOW.”

  Her dreams had long since mostly faded. But she had been a grownup of some kind in all of them. She acted like one now, not raising her voice, not acting angry or spoiled, but matter-of-fact and firm.

  The nurse turned a bit abruptly and left. A few minutes later a young man came in.

  “Now what’s this I hear about you refusing medical care?”

  He briefly studied the various medical readouts on the instruments in the wall or on stands to which she was connected. Then he took out his stethoscope and began to listen to her insides.

  Bethany was silent all through this but by the time he put away the ‘scope she’d decided on what to say.

  “I didn’t refuse THIS.” She waved a hand at the various wires attached to her. “Just an IV. It’s time I had some real food.”

  “I’m afraid your stomach isn’t up to that yet.”

  “I disagree. I KNOW I’m ready.”

  He studied her for a moment. He was quite cute, she noticed. Slender but not wispy, dark eyes and eyebrows, slightly over-long dark hair. A long face with a slightly hawk-like nose .

  “Very well. Let’s give it a try. We’ll start with a few sips of fruit juice and see how you react. But only if you promise to let us put you on an IV if it doesn’t work out.”

  She had no trouble with a small bottle of apple juice served in sips with long pauses in between while the cute doctor monitored her machine body signs and observing her closely.

  “Very well. Now let’s try some soup. What do you say to tomato soup?”

  Her body agreed she could take tomato soup. It took a little while to get a tiny bowl of warm soup delivered. While they waited Jason (his nametag said) casually hitched up a hip onto the bed side and they chatted. He seemed very friendly and interested, but Beth knew this was just his bedside manner.

  That didn’t keep her from fantasizing about him accidentally meetin
g her at, maybe, the mall. And them sitting in the food court and chatting more. And the relationship going on from there....

  But then the soup arrived.

  The small bowl of soup was enough for Beth. She was satisfied and getting sleepy. She agreed to having the IV again and he personally inserted it.

  As she dozed off she thought of what else he might insert in her. And laughed at herself. She must be getting well if she was thinking about sex!

  ·

  More tests in the afternoon were interrupted halfway by her plastic surgeon mother, arriving in all her tall majesty wearing a very white doctor’s smock. She was red-headed, sexy, accomplished, and assertive. Bethany was proud to have her as a mother.

  Her mother held her gently and, surprisingly, wept. So Beth had to play the grownup and pat her mother’s back and stupidly say “There, there” and other meaningless comforts .

  Her mother had just repaired her makeup when her father arrived and more tears flowed. No surprise there. He had always been the more openly emotional one, policeman or not.

  And when he took control of himself Beth’s step-father and her brother Kendall arrived, and then Beth’s maternal grandparents. And shortly thereafter her paternal g’parents (as Ken liked to say).

  When a couple of aunts and uncles showed up the stern grey-haired little nurse supervisor put her foot down. They were all exiled to the nurse’s lounge at the end of a hall except for “Dr. Rossiter” (who’d never taken her husband’s name and actually was Dr. Corcoran) and Bethany’s biological father.

  As they were herded out Ken looked back at her and winked. Beth grinned back at him.

  Soon more relatives arrived and they and the earlier arrivals were exiled to a waiting room on another floor.

  Last to arrive was family medic Dr. Chu-Thi, a short slender Vietnamese woman with an easy colloquial manner hiding a core of steel. She put a stop to all family visits and bade the nursing staff to contact the doctor supervising the tests.

  Shortly she, Beth’s mother, and an older doctor who apparently was the supervising doctor were in the hall outside Beth’s room, where he was being verbally roasted by both women for not contacting them sooner.