Beyond the Veil, Part 2

Just like the first time I died, I felt only a momentary jolt, although this time there was no accompanying pain.

There was strange sensation of absolute freedom as the ties that bound my spirit to the Chakra were severed by whatever self-destruct mechanism he had implanted inside. My spirit self floated out of my body, which I could see blurrily beneath me. I could see Drake more clearly, for some strange reason, as he stood over my now empty body looking down at his handiwork.

I heard him call out to some unseen others, “Bring in the stretcher, it’s over.”

Dr. Geek and a couple of goons came in from a door in the back and made short work of rolling my hefty corpse onto the stretcher that the goons were carrying.

As I watched this take place, I thought back to some instructions that John Red Bear had given me in his instructional sessions on the Spirit Worlds:

“I don’t care what that man has told you, your Spirit cannot be contained by any device of human making. Your Spirit is tied to this body because you have been deceived into believing that you are trapped within it.

“A body can live without Spirit, but it will not move on its own because it is the Spirit that provides the Will. Your Spirit however, lives in its own way with or without a body. It is the Spirit that comes and goes as it will. When your Spirit leaves this body to journey forth into the Spirit Worlds, it may always return. But if the body no longer lives, then the Spirit will no longer be able to control things as it once did.

“You, I think, are unique. This body you have is no longer alive in a biological sense. However it has been made to function without being alive, allowing your Spirit to take control of things and move it without being alive.

“The choice of when your Spirit can come and go, I believe, is entirely up to you. As long as this body is capable of being made to function, your Spirit will be able to use it for such. When you tire of this however, your Spirit may resume its journey into lands beyond the veil of normal death.”

‘So, if the red man knew his shit,’ I thought to myself, ‘I should be able to back down there and kick some serious ass.’

I willed my Spirit to float back down towards my now moving corpse, following the goons as they left the same way they came in. It took some getting used to since, I had always relied upon that slight tug of theChakra to pull me back into place whenever I finished spiritwalking. Without that familiar pull, I had to consciously move back into place by Will alone.

As thhe goons passed fromthe room, I was floating above the body, trying to decide if I needed to go in the same way my body was facing, but that would be difficult, since it was lying on its back now, and I was staring down into my own lifeless lenses. Man, I am one ugly sunavabitch!

By the time I determined to go down face first, they goons had us out into the dreary morning light by a loading dock. They had that same damn truck that we had used to bring Greg’s body back from the West Coast all open and ready to receive me. That bastard Drake knew which choice I would make alright, he had all these plans laid well in advance!

I dove into my body as they trundled us into the nearly full trailer. They took little care in dropping my ass into an open silvered coffin that was nestled nicely next to what I could only presume at the time to be Greg’s coffin.

I was floating freely inside my body as they closed the lid and latched it shut. Total darkness descended as the lid closed, leaving me wondering as to the wisdom of this course of action.

I cannot tell you for sure how long my Spirit lay inside the coffin with my lifeless body as I tried to apply the abstract reasoning John had provided as to how this should work, without any real guidance on how to actually make it all work.

I tried to ‘feel’ for that familiar place inside my chest that used to be my Chakra, but I couldn’t feel anything to grab onto. As best I could, I tried to place my Spirit Self into the same position that I knew the body was lying in, hoping that by doing so I could just will myself into moving the body again.

For a while, every time I thought I had something going, I would think to try it by raising an arm, only to sense that my Spirit arm moved while my body lay still. So I stopped with that approach and went with a more meditative approach.

After what seemed like an eternity, I was able to let go of the idea of things being the way they had been before. shortly after that letting go, I just kind of melted back into my body, I could feel that when I Willed my arm to move, I moved physical arm and Spirit arm together, as one. Of course I quickly came up against my new constraint of being locked in a coffin, that I now could feel was moving in a truck trailer.

After making sure I wasn’t imagining things, I gathered my wits and felt for the first time the strength in this body. I was getting all sorts of feelings I never got when my Spirit was trapped within the Chakra and moved the body only through a sort of remote control. I could feel the pressure of laying upon my back, the jolts of the bouncing trailer.

I gathered my strength and pushed on the lid of the coffin. Even though it was latched on the outside, it wasn’t really desinged to keep someone from escaping per se. I was able to break the flimsy latches and sit up with little trouble. That left me sitting in the back of the semi-trailer that was moving a pretty good clip down a highway.

I debated just hanging out and giving those bastards one Hell of a surprise party when they stopped, but I deceided the wisest course was to get out of this trailer and get back to my apartment. I was going to need to gather my information and contact John Red Bear and see if he could use his contacts to get me a high-level meeting at the Bureau or Justice. I needed to rat this whole program out and use the System to nail Drake’s ass if I could.

Barring that, I could always track his ass down later and get vengeance for all of us that needed avenging.

But before I did anything else, I needed to look and see how careful Drake and Dr. Geek had been in storing their paperwork in this rig, maybe I could snag some files or computer disks to show to the authorities.

More on my escape in part 3 of this installment.