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Here's story 287, of 288 so far.

Please note: permission is expressly denied to input any part of the story below into a machine learning (ML) or artificial intelligence (AI) or Large Language Model (LLM) system in any form.

Return

One hundred and four seconds.

Not a long time. Or is it? It’s less than two minutes, but it could be an eternity under the right circumstances. Press your hand to a hot stove for a minute, and it’ll seem like an hour, as Einstein noted. But one hundred and four seconds is only the blink of an eye within a human lifetime.

It was a cyclist who found me, so I’m told. It wasn’t like in the news, where a passerby rescues someone and then they have a tearful meeting later on. My passerby made the appropriate report to the police after the ambulance had taken me away, then went on with his life. I never met him. But he was there at the right time, and I’m grateful for that.

I’d been out for a run, and I remember feeling that it was more difficult than usual. It was a cold morning and it’s been a long time since I was a young man, so I didn’t think my struggle was unusual. The upwards incline was gentle enough, but I certainly felt it. And then I also felt the sudden pinching, pressing, tearing pain in my chest. The world flipped to the side, and it was only as I hit the ground that I realised it was actually me who’d collapsed, like a puppet with cut strings. Then the pressure, and the pain becoming both glassy and crushing. I couldn’t breathe. Everything went dark.

They shocked me three times at the roadside, but couldn’t get a sinus rhythm. They put me in the back of the ambulance, and one of them drove like hell while the other one kept trying.

I flatlined at 8:48:03 AM, just as the ambulance was coming up against the last of the rush hour traffic.

For one hundred and four seconds, I was dead.

I remember waking up in the hospital. My chest ached, but they said it was from the electricity, not the heart attack. I’d had keyhole heart surgery to stent an artery. They said I wasn’t in bad shape, all things considered, and it’d probably have been a lot worse if I wasn’t physically active. I didn’t see how it could be a lot worse than dying, but I felt sleep pulling me under before I could say so.

The road to recovery was shorter than you’d think. A few days of observation, then home. Follow-up appointments, blood tests, ECGs. Some tweaks to the diet, aspirin for a while, and lots of advice. Truthfully, within a month or two I felt exactly the same as I had before it happened, which is to say completely healthy. They even said I could start running again, if I wanted.

It was five weeks before anyone asked the big question, and of all people, it was the guy at work who’s responsible for health and safety. I think his name is Ross. I don’t know if his interest was personal or professional, but he asked if I’d seen anything while I was dead, and I was relieved that someone had finally brought it up.

“Afraid not,” I said, wryly but carefully, in case he was religious. He wasn’t, and he looked both relieved and disappointed. I think that both reactions are rational and normal.

Two days later, my mother asked the same question, on the phone. I snapped at her a bit, and I regretted it later. Of course not, I said. I wasn’t breathing. My heart wasn’t beating. What would I possibly see?

She apologised, and she got quiet after that, and then I apologised too. It had been difficult for all of us. I think she understood.

Except that she didn’t. The doctors didn’t. Ross-or-whoever didn’t. Nobody did.

One of the nurses gave me a web site to visit. It was a support group that I could attend if I wanted, to help me deal with any residual anxiety or emotional difficulties that the experience might have caused. It seemed to be an afterthought on their part, and while I did visit the site once and read about the group for a couple of minutes, that was as far as it went. What was I going to say to some random strangers?

How long did your recovery take? Have you had any problems since? How are you feeling now?

Did you see her too?

One hundred and four seconds isn’t much time at all, but it was enough. And I remember it very clearly indeed. That’s why I lie whenever anyone asks.

The other place was no white void. No cloudscape. I remember that my first thought was please don’t tell me the Christians are actually right, and I still laugh about that — but I wasn’t laughing at the time. What seemed like luminescence quickly resolved into fluorescent lights, and a room.

It was… a hospital too, I think, or something like that. It had an institutional look to it. There were machines. Nothing very high tech; just equal with here. And there were people. She was there. I knew her, but I couldn’t remember from where, and I still can’t.

I can see her face when I close my eyes.

There were no long-dead family members. No angels or white robes, but she did wear a white lab coat, just like a doctor would. I remember because of how her red hair contrasted vividly against its lapels.

From the look on her face, I think she recognised me too. I wish I knew why.

I had less than two minutes there, and most of that time was already gone by the time I’d looked around (there was a clock on the wall, and something that could have been a fire extinguisher, but different), and then managed to focus on the woman standing near me. I was lying down, probably in a bed. There was a faint ambient sound in the background, but I barely registered it. Once I looked at her properly, I couldn’t look away.

She had an expression of something like awe. Maybe a little fear. But she knew me, and I knew her, and I have no idea what that means, or where I was. But I can tell you this: I’ve been there before.

She had time to say just one thing to me before I… well, before I was brought back to life, I suppose. Back to what I always thought was life. Back to whatever this is.

She looked at me, and she laid her hand on my arm, and I can still smell her perfume and hear her voice when I lie awake at night, in the dark.

You’re the first to ever return.

JINX

KESTREL face a new and terrifying enemy: an all-seeing mastermind who already knows exactly who they are, and many of their deepest secrets. Nothing stays hidden forever, and the line between privacy and liberty is razor-thin…

Book 3 in the KESTREL action-thriller series.

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